Nathan loves to learn. You are likely to run into him at a dairy producers’ conference or a workshop, as he enjoys innovation and is always open to trying out something new to improve his 300 head dairy operation.
One of the seminars offered during the 2010 Great Lakes Dairy Conference had discussed bacterial growth in both colostrum and milk and the importance of rapid cooling or even pasteurizing. “That’s what made me think we needed to do something different because at that time we were dealing with scours.”
Nathan than took the seminar idea and started a frozen colostrum bank. This limited the bacterial growth, but made thawing a lengthy and difficult process. At that time he was storing the colostrum in gallon bottles requiring up to one hour just to thaw it out in scolding hot water. Moreover, he didn’t have a way of pasteurizing his colostrum to address his concerns with Johnes.
So when he saw the ColoQuick system for the first time, he got really excited, “It looked to me like a complete system, much better than what we were doing.” It turned out to be exactly that. Within the first month, the number of calves suffering from scours dropped 80 percent. “We were using injectable antibiotics to treat scours. We have dropped that now and are just using oral ones. That saves us a lot of money.”
Nathan and his team found the system very intuitive and simple to use. Nathan especially appreciates that now he can properly store and manage the colostrum and confirms that the system has made a huge difference: “The ColoQuick is a great tool to have, it definitely makes things faster. Most importantly the ColoQuick makes it easy to do things right.”