Welcome

We hope you enjoy this winter edition of Protein Producers. PAC veterinarians and staff, alongside producers, have witnessed amazing successes, challenges, and opportunities to improve this fall. We have watched some groups of freshly weaned calves arrive at operations and thrive. Other groups of arrivals have suffered BRD morbidity and mortality and lameness issues and have required intense disease management.

The PAC team is focused on spending 2019 explaining why certain individual cattle and specific groups of cattle fail to flourish as we change production addresses. We continue to organize data, history, and arrival management details to more fully understand what factors contribute to production successes. Progress requires knowledge, understanding, and application from progressive immunologists, physiologists, nutritionists, and veterinarians. Our goal is to understand how to maintain cattle hydration, nutrition, immune function, and disease resistance as cattle change production levels and locations.

Our dream is to continue to build on our expertise in animal health management and share this expertise with caregivers. Sharing expertise and creating “expert” caregivers is the obvious way to change health expectations. Carl Bereiter defines an expert as a person that responds to challenging situations by working harder and relying less fully on routines, and seems to be engaged in extending their knowledge rather than merely exploiting it.

We are excited about our 2019 goals to extend caregiver knowledge, increase powers of observation, and increase confidence to intervene in a timely fashion. Never pass up an opportunity to help the animals that we have been granted dominion over.

Looking forward to 2019,

Tom Noffsinger, DVM