{"id":1140,"date":"2013-04-15T14:38:49","date_gmt":"2013-04-15T04:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?p=1140"},"modified":"2013-04-18T18:29:16","modified_gmt":"2013-04-18T08:29:16","slug":"kiwipost-mark-bryan-writes-from-new-zealand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?p=1140","title":{"rendered":"Kiwipost: Mark Bryan writes from New Zealand."},"content":{"rendered":"My new passion is swimming, and I\u2019m quite proud of it. I realise that to Australians this is about as interesting as the remarkably witty comment to Scots about \u201cwhat\u2019s under your kilt\u201d whenever we wear one. But that\u2019s the point?\r\n\r\nUs poor Scottish people don\u2019t do swimming. Although, like you, we live on an island; and although, like you, we\u2019re a bit rough around the edges; unlike you, none of our watery bits ever gets above two degrees; and we\u2019re simply not that rough and tough.<!--more-->\r\n\r\nWe do have some warmer water- notably the stuff around the nuclear power plants that the Poms decided could supply England with power from as far away from England as possible. And we don\u2019t have many things that would eat you that live in our watery bits. But that\u2019s because there wouldn\u2019t be much to eat- normal peoples\u2019 genitalia simply disappear upon immersion in the North Sea.<!--more-->\r\n\r\nSo, swimming is all new and I must say it\u2019s great. However, I can\u2019t help noticing at and around the pool that there are some excellent opportunities for the Japanese, who are currently struggling in the Southern Ocean trying to target their prey. My wife, who is a much nicer person than me, berates me for remarking on this, saying that at least these rather oversize people are at the pool and not at home eating. And that\u2019s a scary thought.\r\n\r\nRecently, I risked career and reputation by running my epidemiological eye over the young boys in the change rooms. (If questioned I was going to say I was auditioning for Pope. I think I would have been let off, or possibly even recommended). Fifty percent were lardy. These are boys that are under 12. This is not their fault but their parents. Think of how hard it is for us to stay lean in middle age when we have grown up lean- these kids haven\u2019t a hope.\r\n\r\nCurrently, we are spending a lot of time measuring the body condition score (BCS) of cows. It\u2019s very challenging to do this on a thousand cows and then go down to the local pool, without casting judgement. A past-president of Federated Farmers once memorably lamented that \u201cwe want our cows at BCS 5 and our women at BCS 3\u201d. He had a point of course, but to expand on that, we wouldn\u2019t really want our cows at BCS 15, which is not an uncommon sight in the pool in Southland.\r\n\r\nMeasuring BCS in dairy herds is a good and objective way of detecting feeding issues. It\u2019s a tool that has been promoted by both the vet profession and DairyNZ for a number of years now, and is finally gaining traction among the more progressive farmers. Typically, we would do whole herd BCS about four times a year. And, because the Kiwi dairy system is built around feeding as little as possible to as many as possible with as little thought to nutrition as possible, you can imagine there\u2019s a fair bit of work to do.\r\n\r\nThe key to monitoring BCS is not the mean, which is largely meaningless, if you\u2019ll pardon the pun. We\u2019re interested in the spread- we want a mean of 4.5 or 5, but we don\u2019t want to achieve that by having heaps of cows at three and heaps at seven. We want as small a spread as possible. This also means we have a very consistent herd, and this means they are easier to manage.\r\n\r\nThe simple equation- which should be tattooed somewhere (added to all the other tattoos, presumably) on the parents of these fat kids- is that energy out needs to equal energy in. Dairy farmers get this. They spend their whole lives trying to maximise energy in so that whatever\u2019s left over can go on the cows\u2019 backs. BCS allows us to identify cows that are lighter than others and manage those differently.\r\n\r\nBCS directly impacts on reproductive indices. If we can better manage BCS at drying off, at calving and at mating we will better manage herd reproductive performance. So, whilst BCS is a proxy for nutrition, it\u2019s a very simple and effective proxy. In a season such as the one we\u2019re having, with large parts of the key dairy areas in NZ officially in drought, BCS monitoring becomes a critical tool.\r\n\r\n<a name=\"_GoBack3\"><\/a>We track the data from all the farms we monitor and benchmark it- I think the benchmarking is also a critical part of the process, because it adds another layer of objectivity to farmers when we feedback. We can say \u201cHere are your herd results.\u201d but also \u201cHere\u2019s how you compare within the region at the same time.\u201d Farmers appear more comfortable with this approach than if we just told them the cows were too fat or thin, and we have seen some good and positive responses from feeding this information back.\r\n\r\nMeasuring BCS in large herds is like swimming 60 lengths. It\u2019s undoubtedly boring, but it\u2019s effective, measurable and important. And it\u2019s worth comparing with that other bizarre sight at the pool- the Aquajogging class. If BCS is like doing lengths; Aquajogging is like metrichecking. Nobody has any idea whether it\u2019s doing any good; and a large part of you feels that you\u2019d be just as effective lying in bed thinking about doing it.\r\n\r\n<strong>MARK BRYAN<\/strong>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My new passion is swimming, and I\u2019m quite proud of it. I realise that to Australians this is about as interesting as the remarkably witty comment to Scots about \u201cwhat\u2019s under your kilt\u201d whenever we wear one. But that\u2019s the point? Us poor Scottish people don\u2019t do swimming. Although, like you, we live on an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82,296],"tags":[987,385,39,988],"class_list":["post-1140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-post","tag-kiwipost","tag-mark-bryan","tag-new-zealand","tag-swimming"],"rise-blocks_total_comments":0,"rise-blocks_categories":[{"term_id":82,"name":"Opinion","slug":"opinion","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":83,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":94,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":82,"category_count":94,"category_description":"","cat_name":"Opinion","category_nicename":"opinion","category_parent":0},{"term_id":296,"name":"Post","slug":"post","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":297,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":39,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":296,"category_count":39,"category_description":"","cat_name":"Post","category_nicename":"post","category_parent":0}],"rise-blocks_excerpt":"My new passion is swimming, and I\u2019m quite proud of it. I realise that to Australians this is about as interesting as the remarkably witty comment to Scots about \u201cwhat\u2019s under your kilt\u201d whenever we wear one. But that\u2019s the point? Us poor Scottish people don\u2019t do swimming. Although, like you, we live on an island; and although, like you,..","blog_post_layout_featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":"","full":""},"categories_names":{"82":{"name":"Opinion","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?cat=82"},"296":{"name":"Post","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?cat=296"}},"tags_names":{"987":{"name":"Kiwipost","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=kiwipost"},"385":{"name":"Mark Bryan","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=mark-bryan"},"39":{"name":"New Zealand","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=new-zealand"},"988":{"name":"swimming","link":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/?tag=swimming"}},"comments_number":"0","wpmagazine_modules_lite_featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":"","cvmm-medium":"","cvmm-medium-plus":"","cvmm-portrait":"","cvmm-medium-square":"","cvmm-large":"","cvmm-small":"","full":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1140"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1169,"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140\/revisions\/1169"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theveterinarian.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}