Dairy Cow Health Challenges & Culbac® Animal Solutions

If you are a dairy farmer, you know the importance of keeping your calves and dairy heifers healthy right from the start. Culbac animal products will help your animals perform at their best. While calves and cows have some unique needs, Culbac animal products are designed to help attain and maintain optimal health for growth, reproduction, and milk production. A healthy and functioning digestive tract and immune system is critical for exceptional milk yield, milk quality, udder health, reproductive efficiency, and overall health in the multiparous cow, heifer, and calf. When rumen health is not optimized, some of the challenges include stressors, poor immune function, lower production, higher feed costs, inadequate fertility, and lower quality. Maintaining a healthy microbiome in the rumen can help you overcome your challenges and lower treatment costs. Culbac natural animal products use our proprietary Culbac® Probiotic Plus™ with additional prebiotics and postbiotics as well as the uniquely stabilized bacteria which is specifically formulated for dairy cattle.

Research studies with Culbac natural animal products have been shown to:

Culbac animal products help to optimize the nutritional strategy on your farm to support superior nutrient uptake, a strong and healthy immune system, high productivity, and high fertility. We offer a line of proven products for your operations.

The Culbac animal products for dairy calves and cows include:

Healthy Start®

A liquid form of Culbac product that can be included in milk replacer, colostrum, or milk. Can be delivered as a spray or drench or included in daily rations. 

Culbac Dry

A dry form of Culbac on a corn-cob base that can be included in TMR or top-dressed for daily digestive support.

Rumen-Bac®

A dry form of Culbac on a corn-cob base with an additional vitamin/mineral pack specifically formulated to support the rumen.

How Our Animal Products Work In Dairy Cows 

When incorporated into feed for dairy cows and calves, 

Culbac animal products travel through the entire digestive tract of an animal with a concentrated formula of vitamins, minerals, and nutrients as well as protected stabilized bacteria. Providing microbial support to the rumen and reticulum both is an important benefit and supports efficient ruminal digestion

The pH balance is critical in the omasum and abomasum. Culbac products provide natural acids which support pH balance in the ruminant animal.  When the stabilized bacteria in Culbac products reach the rumen, enzymes release bioactive ingredients which stimulate the growth of the beneficial bacteria existing in the rumen and reticulum, and throughout the entire digestive tract, and prevent bad bacteria from colonizing. 

Additional bioactive ingredients dilate blood vessels, support responsiveness to stressors, support reproductive efficiency, and provide other physiological support. The stabilized bacteria contain proteins that interact with the animal’s immune system and non-viable DNA (cpg DNA) to prime and ready the immune system for a faster and more effective response to stress or pathogens (bad bacteria).

Benefits of Culbac Animal Products

Heifer health relies on optimized nutritional uptake for breeding efficiency, embryo implantation, a healthy gestation, growth and development. A healthy gut microbiome supports productivity, longevity, udder health, and fertility.

Dairy operations focus on gestation, calving, and weaning of calves. Fertility is a key challenge on dairy cattle operations. Optimal fertility depends on the right diet and efficient nutrient uptake in the animal to ensure proper hormone levels are achieved and to prepare the uterus for implantation. You can have the best ration possible, but if the cow is unable to access or use the nutrients appropriately because her rumen is out of balance or not optimized, then you will not achieve your reproductive goals.

Balanced cycling, effective implantation, and making it through the first 20 days without embryo loss all depend on nutrient uptake. Culbac animal products help during this key time by supporting rumen function and optimizing the bacteria in the ruminal compartments to ensure nutrient uptake and efficient breeding.

Products: Culbac Dry and Rumen-Bac

During this critical time, cows use energy to prepare for calving and producing sufficient milk to feed the calf.

Energy balance at this stage in the process is critical to ensuring the cow is healthy, the calf is born healthy, and that the cow has a healthy udder to produce the milk. Each of these physiological challenges require energy from the nutrients being fed to the animal.

Pharmaceutical interventions cannot to replace a poor or imbalanced rumen – the best health-insurance is providing optimal support to the rumen during gestation, at the critical stages of late gestation and calving, and during the challenges of early lactation. Healthy production includes lower somatic cell counts in milk, with higher levels of components like fat and protein. Milk production, milk quality, udder health, reproductive efficiency, and health for the multiparous cow, heifer, and calf all depend on a healthy and functioning rumen. Culbac Animal products help optimizes a cow’s nutritional uptake from the gestational ration to help meet these challenges.

Products: Culbac Dry and Rumen-Bac

At calving, delivery of colostrum and passive immunity within hours is critical to support digestion and immune development in the calf.  Ensuring that each calf gets a healthy start can make a real difference on return on investment when a calf goes to market. 

Starting on day one, Culbac’s Healthy Start product ensures the development of healthy rumen function in your calves. When calves are born, their digestive function resembles that of a monogastric animal. The swings in pH that are associated with every feeding take extra energy from the calf, and the rumen that starts building in the young calf is affected by how well the calf is able to utilize the nutrients coming from the cow’s udder. Additionally, this is the time when passive immunity is shared between the cow and her offspring. Optimizing that protective infusion from the cow and improving immune function in the young calf will serve that animal throughout its entire lifespan. 

Stress is one of the main challenges with livestock. Keeping a healthy GI tract by stimulating the growth of beneficial microflora native to the animal’s gut will help in times of stress. When healthy gut bacterial populations flourish, overall nutrient absorption increases and feed to gain ratio improves A well-balanced microbiome has been demonstrated to lower stress, maintain appetite, utilize feed more efficiently, and enhance productivity in cattle. Rumen health, stressors, immune function, production, feed costs, fertility: overcome your challenges and lower treatment costs with Culbac all-natural solutions.

All-natural Healthy Start is a concentrated formula that contains Culbac Probiotic Plus™ (tooltip) and can be used from day one to help calves build an optimal functioning digestive system. Because calf digestive function resembles that of a monogastric animal when they are born, it’s a critical time to help your calves establish a healthy intestinal microflora to optimize rumen function.

Products: Healthy Start

Weaning is a stressful time for calves. When animals are stressed, their immune systems are not working at optimal strength. Scours and pathogenic exposure can challenge your young calves.

Whether you are backgrounding or raising calves as replacement heifers, making sure you minimize stress in your animal is the best way to ensure healthy calves for the future of your farm or healthy calves to the sale barn, and efficient response to vaccination.

Culbac nutritional feed supplements include a unique microbial component that has been stimulated to affect both the innate and the adaptive immune system in 3 different ways, as well as to support the entire digestive system, including specific and powerful support for the rumen.

Supporting the immune system is key to ensuring robust vaccine responsiveness and enhancing health to minimize or eliminate treatment costs. Protecting and enhancing the efficiency of the entire gastrointestinal tract and supporting the microbial balance that breaks down feed nutrients so the animal can use them helps to maximize performance and ensure profitability. Amino acids, peptides, peptidoglycans, vitamins complexed for immediate uptake in the animal, and minerals crucial to immune health, support gut health and improve metabolic activity to optimize animal performance. The digestive tract’s immune system is often referred to as gut-associated lymphoid tissue (GALT) and protects the body from invasion. The digestive tract is a very important component of the body’s immune system. In fact, the intestine possesses the largest mass of lymphoid tissue in an animal’s body. The GALT is made up of several types of lymphoid tissue that store immune cells, such as T and B lymphocytes, that carry out attacks and defend against invading pathogens.

Healthier calves mean greater milk production, higher quality grades and more premium milk value. Boosting the immune system and minimizing stress at the same time is a great added benefit to support the health of your calves and optimize immunization responses to give your calves the best protection.

Products: Healthy Start

When it’s time to breed heifers, we often accomplish our AI protocols and then change their environment, change their diet, and don’t consider the stressors that can lead to an imbalance in the rumen function, depress the immune system, and create a lack of focused energy toward reproductive patency in the animal. Even the best vaccinated and preconditioned animals have lowered immune response to pathogens and a higher propensity to embryo loss due to environmental stressors. Subclinical infections, whether metritis or mastitis or something else, can drop your breeding efficiency significantly. Because these subclinical infections are not obvious, you may not even be aware that the animal’s immune system is fighting a battle that takes a great deal of energy. Making sure that your animals are able to handle the stress and have an optimized immune system to resist pathogens and have energy to commit to generous mucous membranes and a uterine lining ripe for implantation will give them a great start and will get you on your way to a healthy, high-producing herd. The investment will make your business soar.

Products: Healthy Start, Culbac Dry and Rumen-Bac

Any time you are changing the diet, whether at dry-off or for a close-in diet or to the complete lactating diet, there can be digestive issues. Adding a feed additive like Culbac® Animal Dry or Rumen-Bac® can help to minimize the effects of these dietary changes. The microbiome within the digestive tract of the cow, in the reticulum and rumen in particular, is very sensitive to these changes and needs to recalibrate to manage the new feed intake and differing feed and nutrient components. Culbac products have been shown in field studies and in university studies to help support these changes within the microbiome, while ensuring the most effective nutrient uptake for your animal. Efficiently using the nutrients in the diet means your feed costs translate more directly into production pay-outs, so it is a win-win for the farm to incorporate these feed additives, particularly during transition.

Healthy Start, Culbac Dry and Rumen-Bac

Getting your animals back to cycling after calving and entering the milking herd should be a quick and painless process. Making sure that they are healthy and have an immune system that is targeting infections and maintaining overall health for the animal, and not harboring clinical or subclinical (the kind you can’t detect directly) infections will help ensure effective AI for the next gestation. When artificially inseminating, you need to have a uterus that is not only infection-free, but that is prepared for implantation. Nutritional balance is one of the most important factors at this time. Using Culbac products has been shown in studies to help with the take of AI and to help with embryo maintenance and lessen the chance of resorption. This is probably one of the biggest boosts to return on investment on the farm. The small cost of adding a feed additive like Culbac and maintaining reproductive efficiency means that you have less open cows, more pregnant animals that will reach their next peak milking earlier and healthier, and higher overall quality and production from your milking herd.

This is where the health of your animals really can mean profit with milk quality and components as a focus. Finding ways to keep your feed to production ratios their best and make sure your milk quality is high is money in your pocket. The investment of a few cents per head can mean dollars in return. Less mastitis means less antibiotic costs, fewer calls to the veterinarian, fewer days in the sick pen, and less waste milk. Supporting the immune system, making sure the animals are on feed, improving feed to production ratios, and watching your investment thrive are the key goals.

Healthy Start, Culbac Dry and Rumen-Bac