Sauk Prairie Veterinary Clinic
Herd the Moos
June 2016
Sauk Prairie Veterinary Clinic
Summer Appreciation Picnic
June 8, 2016
Prairie du Sac Town Hall
Noon to 2 pm
Dr. Dave Prentice on “Imrestor”
The Office Will Be CLOSED from
11:30 to 2 pm for the Summer Picnic!
June Dairy Month Rebate
The Sauk Prairie Veterinary Clinic would like to offer you a “June Dairy Month Special” that all clients can take advantage of. If you pay your bill for all services and products you receive in June by July 15, you will receive a 3% rebate off the total amount on your July statement. We appreciate your hard work in feeding America and thank you for your business!
Dr. Hunter Lang’s Medical Adventures
As many of you know, Dr. Lang was injured on a Tuesday with a broken nose followed by a massive heart attack the next Monday which will require his attention for the next few weeks while he regains his health. If he hadn’t been in town for his wifeLaura’s teaching award, Hunter would not be here as he would have been on a farm at the time it occurred. He was very fortunate instead to be on med flight with a doctor who was able to shock him when he went into cardiac arrest. He put family first and as a result, it saved his life!
Please feel free to text him with any get well wishes that you would like, but we request you send all questions and any problems to the other veterinarians in the practice via the office so that he has ample opportunity to recover and do his cardiac rehab without the added stress of work issues. Thank you for understanding!
Veterinary Work & Program Schedules We greatly appreciate the extra assistance many of you have offered and provided us at short notice these last two weeks. We are really grateful for your continued support, extra help with surgeries and understanding as the summer progresses.
We have also decided to put family first and continue with any vacation plans the rest of the staff has already booked which means we will be asking some of you to change the time and maybe even the day of your regularly scheduled program. At times, we will have only two veterinarians available which means we can’t cover three programs at the same time. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause but truly thank you for your flexibility and willingness to work with us.
With the summer heat and humidity here, we will try to get to programs as efficiently as possible so cows don’t have to be locked up long. If you have an emergency call, please call it in as soon as you know about it so that we can get them done before regularly scheduled herd checks. Otherwise it make take a bit longer than we’d like to get to your emergency. We will try to contact you if there will be a delay so make sure we have a current cell phone number and know who to contact if you are on vacation as well.
New Faces At the Vet Clinic
There are several new faces at the vet clinic this summer. Eddie Schott, Dr. Lynae’s son, has been assisting in the office and on farm after school when available and will continue to do so throughout the summer. Hailey Brummel, Dr. Eric’s daughter, will also be working in for the clinic throughout the summer. In addition, we have a Zoetis Summer Intern, Angela Krzmarzick from Illinois who is a junior vet student and Breanna Scott, who is aMATC vet tech student from Baraboo. Both will be with us most of June.
Imrestor, A New Immune Modulator Product for Prefresh Cows
Dr. Dave Prentice will be speaking on this brand new product, Imrestorat our picnic. It is produced by Elancoand should be on the market the first week in June. Imrestoris a two dose product. It is an immune modulator which when given to prefresh cows, ideally one week before calving and then again at calving will increase the cows ability to fight infection. The current label claim is for a 28% reduction in mastitis in the first 30 days of calving. It stimulates the cows’ ability to produce neutrophils (a white blood cell) that is normally decreased around the time of calving. These cells are then available to fight infection where needed within the cow.
Since Imrestor is not an antibiotic there is no milk or slaughter withdrawal on the product. It comes in individual 3 ml syringes that will be used once and then disposed of. The cost will be $16.63 per dose. There is a current rebate program. Those who sign up with the Elanco representative to purchase over 50% of their herd in six months will receive $4.00/dose back once that amount has been purchased. Those who wish to try a smaller sample of cows will still sign up and then will receive a $2.00/dose rebate on those doses. They are doing the rebate to help gage how much of the product will be needed so an adequate supply is available.
Foot Rot & Ringworm Spray
There is a new Foot Rot and Ringworm Spray available by AgriLabs. It contains Benzalkonium Chloride and should be applied daily until the hair begins to grow.
Vertical Integration in the Dairy Industry?
We have seen vertical integration in other food animals such as hogs and poultry. Vertical integration is where a company owns/controls the whole process from conception to final product. The pork industry has a giant company, Smithfield foods which is headquartered in China, that has the largest slaughterhouse and meat packing plant in the world located in Tar Heel, NC. Smithfield raises over 15 million pigs a year and processes over 27 million hogs per year.
We have just seen the first small step in this direction in the dairy industry. Dannon yogurt is going direct to farmers to get some of their milk which allows Dannon to dictate practices such as animal welfare, antibiotic usage, crop selection and nutrient management. This shouldn’t be dismissed because Dannon currently sells one third of all the yogurt in the US. The company is tapping into consumer interest about where the ingredients in their yogurt come from and how it is produced on the farm. The recent announcement will supply 40% of Dannon’s milk requirement from just seven farm families. One of these farms, McCarty Family Farms, milks 8,500 cows spread across 4 farms and 2 states. The McCarty’s initially signed a contract with Dannon in 2011. At that time, the farm built a reverse osmosis plant that allows them to remove enough water from their milk that a tanker from their farm is equivalent to 2 to 2.5 conventional tankers. The farms get a price guarantee for their milk as long as they meet Dannon’squality standards. One of the biggest obstacles Dannon has placed on these farms is to be GMO free by 2018. Most of these farms cannot grow enough feed to meet their needs so they will have to convince their growers that non-GMO feeds can be grown at a competitive price.
The second area that points to increased vertical integration is Walmart’s plans to open a milk plant in Indiana by the end of 2017. So far no information is available about who Walmart will buy milk from!