Devastating News about our Cow Ladybug

Homesteady - Stories of Living off the Land

This week we got the worst news about our cow ladybug.

A routine disease test for our cows showed that Ladybug may be sick with Johnes Disease.

Johnes Disease is devastating. It is a wasting disease, that prevents a cow from absorbing nutrients from the food it is eating. It can infect a calf before it is even born, and yet it will not kill that animal for a few years. It lies, secretly, beyond detection, for years, and when some stressful event happens in the cows life, for example, a calving, like the one ladybug had back in the fall, the disease goes active and quickly can turn a healthy looking cow into a skeleton, killing somewhere around 90% of cows that test positive with it.

Because it can infect a cow for years without killing it, it spreads through cow herds quite easily.

It is believed that all major diary and beef herds have Johnes positive cows. That is specifically why, when we purchased our first dairy cow, we found a herd of cows that was believed to be free of all cow diseases, including Johnes. Sadly this appears not to have been the case.

In this episode of the podcast we talk about the sad news, and what will happen going forward.

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