200 dead cows in Wisconsin

laura zone 5 I carry insurance on a fraction of the heard. if I lose say ten head its covered, if I lose 100 head its not covered. my thinking is a act of god could get a few and that would be a bad loss but the whole heard not likely and the insurance would be way to high. the insurance agents can't tell one cow from another so only the "insured" cows die.

Got "The Country Today" (one of Wisconsin's 3 premier farm papers) in front of me now. The guy had regular farm insurance, so his cattle would have been covered by lightening strikes, fire, possibly theft, but not disease. He figures with the animals (all holstein steers) averaging between 800 to 1500 lbs (some of these were finished steers) with an average weight of 1000 he would have gotten $158,000 at the sale barn on the day they died at market price. He's just out that money.

They've determined it was not respiratory due to test results, but now think its feed contamination and are waiting for results on that. He (like alot of growers) had all his steers vaccinated, so it would have been wierd for that many, 1/4 of the herd, to die from something he'd vaccinated for at weaning.

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You heard it here first.

Actually, If it was purchased feed that would be the best thing that could happen for the farmer, then the feed seller would be liable, unless he was feeding it wrong.

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Libertarindependent

The first cow apparently died on Tuesday of that week. The symptoms, according to the vet, were of respiratory problems, and his first tests showed a pneumonia like virus. BUT...now the Madison lab says "inconclusive" on the virus, so they're looking elsewhere. particularly since the animals had been vaccinated, and didn't respond to known treatments for pneumonia viruses.

If it IS the feed, yes, he'll have a claim against the feedmill...if that's where it came from. This time of year it could be bad hay, bad haylage, bad just-about-anything. Since they were slaughter steers, he wouldn't be giving them anything "extra", like you might for freshening or calves. Just a hard situation for the farmer, all around.

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I have, several times, insured high $ horses that were something I wouldn't have the $$ to replace out of pocket if they dropped dead from something. For breeding horses, mortality insurance, which covers nearly everything, is not prohibitive. I think the last stallion I had covered (he was leased and a condition of the lease was insurance) was $250 a year for $5000 value.

I have, in fact, in the 30 years I've had horses, insured probably 20 animals for one or more years ... and had 2 horses die while insured. Other than an autopsy, to determine cause of death and that negligence was not a factor, I have never had any trouble at all with a claim even the 2 year old that I insured when I bought him that died 4 days later!

That would be my thought too. I can't think of anything that could sweep through a herd that fast.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) -- A state lab says the 200 steers that died this month in Portage County were done in by tainted potatoes.

Peter Vanderloo is an associate director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, which is run on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He says the cows tested positive for a toxin that's found in moldy sweet potatoes.

He said Friday the bad spuds were apparently mixed in with potato waste fed to the animals.

The cows died Jan. 14. Because of their symptoms, early indications suggested they died of pneumonia or another bovine virus. Vanderloo says tests found no evidence to support those theories.

Vanderloo says it's common practice to give animals food that can't be used for human consumption. He says there was no risk to human health.

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Thanks..... Now we know what happened. It makes sense to me.

How sad. I did think from the start that it sounded like contaminated feed. There's more detail in this article:

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/loca...cc4c03286.html

Peg

i read about the process of starting cows on grain. and that if fed grain too suddenly they build up and if there is a cold snap they die .. sounds like what happened here

THAT IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED HERE!! The cattle died from a toxin consumed from eating moldy sweet potatos.

But my question is.... do we even grow sweet potatoes in WI??
I know this farm is in potato country, and we grow lots of baking type potatoes up there. But I wonder whre the sweet potatoes came from?

They may not have been grown in WI. BUT they may have been stored at any one of the number of potato plants around. Shipped in, and stored and then trucked out to stores etc. Under the name of what ever company that was, with their label on it.
And they may have had a bad batch for human use and this cattle guy was using that to supplement his feed.

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Sweet potatoes are really high in nutrients and sugar, and would be great to feed almost anything you wanted to fatten up for slaughter. I agree with AK that they probably came from a storage facility waiting to be shipped out. Since cattle can get by eating almost any plant material (they thrive on silage which is NOT something I'd care to eat) it's common to take grains and plants that didn't make the "human consumption" cut and give to the cattle.

It's also possible that sweet potatoes are something cattlemen up here use regularly to fatten cattle. They're not expensive, and have that sweet taste that most animals love.

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sweet potatoes are not regularly grown here. its not hot enough long enough. I dont know where he got them. Someone asked earlier. they were all holstein steers. That farmer runs 800-1000 normally.

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That's what I thought. I was just curious about how/why it's (I assume) more economical to truck in large quantities of sweet potatoes, when we can grow plenty of good cattle fodder right here.
Maybe the potato warehouses had them brought in to distribute with other spuds, and this guy could pick up the bad ones cheap.

It's fairly common practice to use waste products from food production for animal feed. Whey, distillers grain, soybean oil meal, and products that don't make the grade for human consumption.

The production company can either pay to get rid of the waste, or sell it for a low price. The farmer in Wisconsin can pay a small price and shipping from the south, and still be ahead as far as costs go.

People ship hay across the country. If they can afford to do that, then shipping a commodity waste product can be affordable as well. In Wisconsin we feed cotton seed as part of a mixed ration. It doesn't grow here, but shipping by train doesn't cost that much when you're talking about tons at a time, especially if the train was going to come back empty anyway.

The economics are sort of like the ones for cow manure. It costs more to spread the manure than you get for the fertilizer value. What you have add in to the equation is the disposal cost of the manure. In that case, the fertilizer value decreases the disposal cost, not to mention... what else are you going to do with it?

Michael

35 years ago, an Or/Ida French fry factory was struggling with ways to get rid of all the potato waste. They had big stinky lagoons for all the water, but tried to feed the solids to cattle. They had cattle in pasture and a truck would dump a big pile every day. Worked fine, but I wondered about the flavor of the meat.

Around the same time a hog farmer got a train car load of Hersey candy bars. There was a problem with the label or freah date expired, whatever. He fed them to his pigs, wrapper and all. He had to balance the ration somehow, of course, but that’s a lot of chocolate.

I saw a semi trailer, the kind the wood industry fills with wood chips, with 12,000 pounds of Chips Ahoy cookie crumbs. There were also a couple carts with chunks of chocolate, about a thousand pounds.
It was going to a place that markets bear bait.

A local cheese plant gave whey to local pig farms.

In today’s market, managing the nutritional requirements requires open-mindedness to low cost substitutions. This time it backfired.