A Week With the Wonderful Dr. Tom Noffsinger
At PAC Beef Summits in Kearney, NE this year I met many very incredible people that I have admired for quite some time now. From that meeting, I had since lined up a week travelling around with Dr Tom Noffsinger. I met him and his lovely wife Dianne at their ranch in Nebraska Sunday night, the 7th of May. My directional skills being what they are in this country and my lack of phone service in Nebraska lead to an extra 2 hours on my trip up there, but I really wasn’t too worried about that. It meant I was able to have another look around at a little different country.
Dr Tom is a consulting veterinarian for the PAC group (Production Animal Consultants). His job entails a variety of things working towards an end goal of improved economics, animal health, efficiency and all that that entails for beef producers and feeders in many areas around the globe. There is also a large portion of Dr Tom and all the PAC vets’ jobs dedicated to building stronger teams, better facilities and cattle acclimation, which is especially important in a feedlot setting.
We left early Monday morning (maybe 4am mountain-time), for North Platte Livestock Feeders. Dr Tom was consulting there with Dr Jose Valles Monday and Tuesday that week and I was extremely fortunate to have been given the opportunity to tag along.
I was really impressed with this company. Everyone was smiling, enthusiastic and happy, which really does a lot towards enhancing the workplace environment. Dennis Stuckey was the feedlot manager here in this location. He is a very intelligent and humble man and it was really special how sincerely he cared for the wellbeing of his employees.
Many of the blokes that work out there are of Mexican decent and I was very lucky to ride with them quite a bit through my time there. During which, they did their best to teach me, and I did my best to learn a little more Spanish! I had a lot of fun. Learning Spanish has been on my ‘to do list’ for a very long time now and I have worked on it a little, but it was very cool to be able to put it into practicality and speak it with people who were very patient and enthusiastic for me to learn. Some of these blokes did not speak much English if any, so some conversation was lost in translation. But I’m doing my best to get fluent and we had translator apps on our phones, which did help a lot when things got a little tough! haha Dennis does offer two English lessons a week on the company budget for his team also to my understanding. This was the first time I had seen this and I thought it was excellent.
The Feedyard was 80,000 head and covered 700 acres of land. All the cowboy’s horses were company owned. There were around 60 of them and they were all extremely fit and healthy, the horse barn and pens were immaculate and among the best I have seen in a feedlot. There were 5 hospital barns spread out over sections of the Feedyard to limit the amount of travel for sick and injured cattle prior to their treatment.
I rode pens with the feedyard cowboys, helped with shipping and sorting cattle, Dr Tom and I drove and acclimated problem pens, according to the data sheets. We conducted autopsies on deads to identify causation and find out what could be improved on to ultimately improve morbidity and mortality rate. I spent a little time in the hospitals with some of the cowboys and Dr Jose, wherein I was able to experience the way things were done and the treatment protocols this company has implemented for sick and injured cattle. They also had some really nice recovery pens and a system for identification of treated animals, which seemed to work well for them.
It is absolutely infectious just how much Dr Tom enjoys and cares for these animals. Once, we were talking with Jose about having completed the autopsies for the day and he had mentioned somewhere in that conversation that, “another heifer had gone to heaven.” He has so much respect for the lives of these animals and the importance of the job they are put on this wonderful earth to do. It just amazes me the absolute sincerity Dr Tom expresses towards his care and concern for the health and wellbeing of cattle and the way he makes everyone around him feel special while he teaches them about it.
I got a lot of value out of acclimating pens with him. Dr Tom has a very admirable way of reading cattle behaviour that I will constantly strive to emulate throughout my lifetime. Many people do not know the economical, productive and animal health benefits associated with cattle acclimation. But if you take the time to learn to understand it and measure the benefits it imposes upon these areas within your own business, there is no going back! A large portion of the PAC vets jobs are dedicated towards teaching people about not only the physical health of cattle but also the mental and emotional health also and how they are all linked. If this is a new concept to you, you may think that sounds a little or completely ridiculous but when cattle are sad or uneasy, their ADG and feed conversion drops and they tend to be more prone to sickness.
I will probably remember this heifer forever as she opened a whole new door for me...
Dr Tom and I were riding through one of these ‘problem pens,’ which basically just means that the lbs/head consumed had dropped slightly throughout the pen and the rate of pulls had increased a little. This heifer stood out among the heard as depressed and a little emaciated. She could have quite easily have been pulled, assessed on the whisper and treated that day, however, through a small amount of time spent gently working with her (which would have amounted to absolutely nothing in comparison to the time it may have taken to pull, assess and treat her in the hospital of a feedlot this large when everyone already has 1000 other things to do) and a little observation of her behaviour, it was quite obvious that she was very uncomfortable standing any closer than 8 meters from the bunk and water trough. So it was evident that she was a buller calf, had lost a lot confidence being in that area of her pen and was basically starving herself from feed and water to avoid being bullied in those areas by more assertive cattle.
She wasn’t pulled and ran through the chute, so the extra stress that could have been imposed upon her that way was eliminated. As was the cost of the potential treatment drug that was less than necessary in this case. However, she was moved to a recovery pen with cattle that would help build her confidence back up at the bunk and water trough. When she was back on track, she would be moved back into her pen with no extra cost. Feed allocated to that pen that would have previously been delivered for her was deducted from her old pen's ration and sent to the recovery pen instead. Cost of medication, cowboy’s time and extra stress put on this heifer was eliminated also, as she did not need to run through the hospital barn.
Isn’t it amazing how a little bit of time and good stockmanship can make such drastic improvements on profitability and efficiency. Sometimes you just miss simple things like that.
As for the rest of her pen, we acclimated as usual. Rode through looking for particularly ordinary looking cattle (eg the heifer above) and when she was all we could find, we spent a minute teaching these cattle to move off of pressure with regard to what their body language was telling us. Soon enough we went from a pen of Black Angus cattle standing around, looking a little sad and board to having said cattle run, cough and play a little. I looked around a while later when we were working with this heifer and the reaction was absolutely phenomenal! We had the attention of every single calf in that pen and they were all responsive, waiting to see what we would like them to do next. When we left the pen, they all ran to the bunk. It was like they had magnets attached to their noses and the feed bunk was made of steel. Incredibly rewarding!
Monday night we had dinner in the town of North Platte with Jose at an excellent Mexican restaurant. I learned a lot about his story also, which is an absolute unforgettable inspiration and later on through the night he had mentioned something to the waitress in Spanish. Neither Tom or myself did catch what he said, but later found out after the whole crew came out singing with a cake and a sombrero for him to wear, that Jose had told her it was Dr Tom’s “birthday” and he would like a surprise cake!
Wednesday we spent the morning out on Dr Tom and Dianne’s ranch in Nebraska artificially inseminating their Red Angus replacement heifers. They work out of staging pens there and a bud box leading up to a two way straight race that merged to one with no backs on the top. Tom and I went to Cheyenne feeders in Kansas that afternoon which was a much smaller feedlot of only a couple thousand and much different in many ways. Out there we conducted more autopsies and acclimation of pens. We also helped out in the shed while the cowboys were doctoring and I got to work on my Spanish a little more! Haha
Thursday we drove down to Schramm Feedlot in Yuma Colorado, which was a fantastic feedlot! Everyone was very welcoming! I rode the morning with one of the cowboys who had never seen a map of the pens but could recite to me every single pen, where it was and what lot number it contained! He was extremely observant! He'd just about memorised every single steer and heifer in the whole yard and could tell me what they all individually looked like yesterday and what he expected them to look like today and tomorrow. He spoke some English, but not much so he spent the morning not only teaching me about the way things run out there but I also learned a little more Spanish with him.
The team out there were hungry to learn and so enthusiastic to improve! I really enjoyed the time I spent at Schramm Feedlot. I helped in the processing shed a while and out with entry cattle. We did more autopsies and rode through the retreat pen. If it had been a little drier, we may have been able to sort go home cattle from the recovery pen, but they were getting a lot of much needed rain in that area.
I got a lot of value hanging out with the Mexicans that week! It’s such a cool language and culture and you cant help but enjoy yourself! They were all such hard working, knowledge thirsty people and they really earned a lot of respect from me because of that. Unfortunately my time there had to end but I’ll remember and appreciate my week with Dr Tom’s forever. The little pieces of coaching he gave to me, even when he didn’t know that’s what he was doing, are extremely priceless and I’ll always remember the kindness he and his beautiful wife showed me that week.