In severe cases, milk fever can be fatal
By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content
Farms.com
Keeping their cows healthy is a main priority of any dairy farmer, but sometimes the animals don’t show any visible symptoms of illness.
Protekta Inc., a Lucknow, Ontario based distributor of livestock production products, introduced X-Zelit at CDX this week. It’s a new product to help prevent hypocalcemia - more commonly known as milk fever.
“It’s fed to the cows two weeks prior to calving (500g of X-Zelit per cow daily),” said owner Morten Jakobsen, who started the company in 2003 after moving to Canada from Denmark.
“It makes the cow start her own hormonal reaction of drawing calcium from her bones into the blood and preparing her for an easy calving and an easy transition.”
Symptoms of serious milk fever can include an increased heart rate, loss of consciousness and muscular weakness, which may be visible to the human eye; X-Zelit is designed to help cows suffering from subclinical milk fever, meaning they may not show any symptoms.
Without the proper calcium levels, cows could contribute to losses on the financial side and be susceptible to ketosis, or retaining its placenta.”
“It’s costing milk production, they say, an average of 1 to 1.25Kg per day for the first 100 days,” Jakobsen said. “Fifty per cent of cows are subclinical at some point during calving.”