The Significance of Trace Elements and Dairy Herd Health – One Farmer Shares His Story

The importance of overall herd health cannot be overstated. Health impacts on a great many aspects of the dairy cow, from fertility to food absorption to milk quality. There are so many factors that can influence the health of a dairy cow, one of these being trace elements. The most important trace elements are Copper, Cobalt, Selenium and Iodine. Each of these plays a vital role in helping the dairy cow maintain a healthy and fertile profile. A deficiency in any of the aforementioned elements can lead to problems with immunity, fertility, food absorption to name a few. Thus investigating whether a trace element deficiency exists in your herd is worth undertaking.

One farmer that did just that is John Bell. He runs a mainly dairy enterprise in Mullaghgare, Newtownbutler in Co. Fermanagh with his son Eric. The Bells have a herd of 120 dairy cows with 60 followers. They have an average 7500 milk yield per cow with mainly AI used on the dairy cows. The importance of trace elements came onto John’s radar three years and he has kindly decided to share his story with us.

“Three years ago, we became concerned about the health of our herd. We felt the cows were not performing as well as they could be. Eric and I found calving time to be difficult as the cows were retaining their placentas amongst other calving issues. The fertility of the herd was also a concern during the breeding season.”

“We decided to enlist our local vet and SQP to help us identify where our issues were stemming from. We found a deficiency in the trace elements of Copper, Cobalt, Selenium and Iodine. CoseIcure Cattle Boluses were recommended to us by both our vet and SQP. CoseIcure Cattle Boluses supply a continuous amount of trace elements for up to six months, which really appealed to us. We learnt that the reason for the continuous supply was due to the unique soluble glass that the bolus was made from and how this eliminates peaks and troughs in the supplementation.”

“We now bolus all our cows at the drying off period and all of our young stock over 250kg are also bolused. This regime helps us address the trace element deficiency in a practical and pragmatic way. We are extremely pleased with the results we have seen with CoseIcure Cattle Boluses. Our overall herd health has increased and our fertility and calving issues have reduced dramatically. Our calves are born healthy, which results in less need to call the vet. As a consequence, our vet bill has dropped as our cows and calves grow healthier. We are very happy with CoseIcure Cattle Boluses and we will continue to use them to help improve the health of our dairy herd.”

Any form of trace element supplementation should only be given where a need to do so has been established, and on the advice of a veterinarian, nutritionist or animal health advisor.