Geoff Lawton's "Advanced Cell Grazing" video now live!

andrew curr wrote:IM having trouble with th full video!
I would Love to see MY cows!
I seent them to Zatuna Loaded with honey locust!

Renate Haeckler wrote:I love Geoff Lawton's videos but this one bugged me.

Experienced dairy people would never have let the cow get to the poor condition like that, but I think Geoff is busy on a lot of projects and maybe doesn't have the time to be there observing. My guess is she got ketosis, which is treatable when caught early. By the time she died it looked like she was skin and bones. It seems someone should have noticed her deteriorating condition. Not blaming anyone - lots of people get dairy cattle without knowing the common maladies and how to spot them, but it's a reminder to all that they are highly bred, high performance animals and as such aren't your typical "throw them on good pasture and they'll be fine" kind of cattle.

I noticed some of the Jerseys seemed to have lots of bots and what looked like bot injuries, if I'm not mistaken. Not sure what the current thinking is on that but when Dad had the dairy they never left the bots in the cattle.

Also, I saw one clip where the cows were penned with horses, it looked like. Note to newbies - don't do that unless you're sure the horses won't chase the cattle or they may go through the electric fence! Our mule (gone now) was good 99% of the time but every now and then he'd decide they needed to run.

I wonder if he mowed after they grazed, which I hear a lot of rotational grazing people do, to keep the weeds from getting an advantage.

Renate Haeckler wrote:Yeah, I think Dexters would do a lot better for dairy on his farm.

& I thought it was a Holstein that died?

Renate Haeckler wrote:One more thing I'm noticing, and it's got me curious. The grass in the videos looks kind of pale green to me, and not really very lush. I've read in other places where people tried rotational grazing and did soil analyses that the mineral content of the grass didn't actually increase all that much. In something like 7 years it stayed almost the same. The THEORY is that letting the grass grow taller makes deeper roots that can pull up more minerals, but if you're starting with depleted soil, I wonder how long it takes in real life?

Manfred Eidelloth wrote:@andrew: In the long version of the video you can see the jersey cows being unloaded. They look quite good then.

Guess the one that died later was in full lactation and could not deal with the transition to low energy density feed by adapting her rumen bacteria and reducing her milk production fast enough. In this case a cow loses weight very fast and her liver gets stressed to the maximum. You could say the cow is poisoned by the harmful substances released in her body by melting down her fat reserves too fast.

You never feed a cow. You always feed the bacteria in her rumen. It is like a biogas reactor. You are feeding bacteria and the cow lives of their excrements and of the decomposed stuff. And bacteria are highly specialized in what they can eat. If you change what you put into the cow, most of the bacteria in her rumen die of starvation and other kinds of bacteria, specialized on the new input, have to propagate first, before they are numerous enough to break down the now food fast enough to feed the cow with their egesta. In the meantime the cow must live of its reserves.

Therefore high producing cows get the exactly the same food ration every day. A human might think: How boring, no alternation. But the bacteria inside the cow say: Yummy! Exactly what we love to eat!

If you have to change the ration of a cow, you do it slowly, over some days, to give the bacteria fauna in the rumen time to adapt.

Of course if a cow gets a ration of high diversity every day, there are all kinds of bacteria in her rumen in lager numbers and they can break up almost everything. And if there should be 10 % or so of new stuff they do not like and can not break down, this will not be a big problem for the cow, as 90% of her rumen staff keeps working.Saw tyhe long version MY cows looked fine !


The worst thing you can do is: Take ha high producing cow away from her ration and give her a totally different ration that in addition contains less energy. The bacteria might take several days for adaption and even when they have adapted, the cow gets far less energy than before.

This can kill a cow and in this case it seems to have killed a cow.

I really acknowledge that Geoff does admit this failure, thereby giving everyone new in the cattle business the chance to learn from it.

We all make mistakes. And it is a real advantage when you get the chance to learn from other people´s mistakes before they happen to yourself.