S4 Ep1: Body Condition Scoring Livestock

Aloha! Thank you for tuning in! In this episode, we will be talking with Melelani Oshiro, who is the Livestock Extension Agent at UH CTAHR. She will be discussing the importance of body condition scoring for assessing the nutritional health of your livestock. This tool can be incredibly useful, so be sure to tune in and learn more!

Resources: 

• Body Condition Scores and Frame Scores For Beef Cattle
• Body Condition Scoring Sheep
• Body Condition Scores in Goats
• How Do You Evaluate A Chicken's Body When You Can't Even See It?

Thanks for listening! Check out our other social media platforms!

Transcript

Shannon Sand: [00:00:00] Today's episode is sponsored by the Livestock Extension Group out of the University of Hawaii, Manoa College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, the Center for Ag Profitability out of the University of Nebraska Lincoln, and the Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program.

Melelani Oshiro: Aloha and welcome to the Livestock Wala'au, a podcast aimed to provide educational support, information, guidance, and outreach to our livestock stakeholders in Hawai'i and the rest of the U. S. We are your hosts, Mele Oshiro and 

Shannon Sand: Shannon Sand. And today we will be talking about body condition scoring with our very own Melalani Oshiro also known as Mele. So thank you for joining us today, Mele. Thank you. So can you just give us kind of the basics of what is body condition scoring in case some people don't know? 

Melelani Oshiro: Sure. Yeah. Thank you also, Shannon, for joining us today. We've had a great opportunity to sort of talk about body condition scoring, and I think we've touched upon it, talking about different species and different topics throughout some of our podcasts. But during this sort of spring time of the year is a, is a good time to start to think about this. And so we thought, Hey, I thought, well, let's talk a little bit about it because I don't think we've really gone through exactly what body condition scoring is. 

Shannon Sand: Yeah. I think we've mentioned it, but never. Specifically stated what it is and I, I think depending on probably where you live, your level of experience in like agriculture and livestock, and you may or may not. 

Melelani Oshiro: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you can think of body condition scoring as a sort of. system. It's a system that you can use to evaluate the [00:02:00] condition, the body condition of your particular livestock species that you're, you're looking at.

And it's commonly, used across the beef systems, dairy systems small ruminants, sheep and goats, and even in poultry, you can do body condition scoring and it gives you're an assessment of the animals body fat, their reserves of the animals and sort of the muscle Composition, in the animals and more so relative to the fatness and those reserves in those animals.

You want to look at that condition on the animal during certain different stages of production or growth and evaluate them. So every different species, is going to have a different system. So 

Shannon Sand: yeah, that was kind of going to be one of my questions, I think. Yeah. Yeah, I wasn't sure what the differences were for them.

Melelani Oshiro: And it's, I mean, it's going to differ because the composition of the animals and the structures of the animals are all going to be different, but you're sort of, they're all evaluating sort of those body fat reserves in those animals and looking over muscle [00:03:00] build of those animals. You use sort of the different structural points of the animal in order to evaluate, their body condition. For example, with cattle, the system uses a nine point scoring system, a body condition of one would be an animal that's extremely thin and an animal of body condition of nine would be something that's really obese. So these, obese animals are your, what we call tabletops, so they're flat backs, very boxy looking animals, you don't want to have that much fat on an animal. It's not going to be value in the animal. And to say, right, when you send those animals off to slaughter in a sense. 

Shannon Sand: Well, also if it's one, you're looking at a rebreed, I assume. Just like in humans, if we're obese, it's really, it can be more difficult for females to get pregnant. 

Melelani Oshiro: Exactly.

Yeah. So that's exactly it. Right. If you're too thin or if you're too on the end, you can have impacts and it impacts the amount of time it takes for the animal to come back to be rebred. If you're looking at cattle. You can increase your pregnancy rates up to [00:04:00] almost 80%.

And beef cattle would be a body condition of like five and a half to six. That's sort of the ideal area where you want the animals to be. They return back into estrous quicker. You can rebreed them quicker and and synchronizing your herd is just easier. There's a lot of details that go into evaluating your animals using body condition scores. And it's something that you'd learn over time. You have to sort of train your eye of what areas of the animal you're looking at. With beef cattle, we'll start with beef cattle, just because. I think it's one of the systems that we use more often and teach more often. Looking at body condition scores. 

Shannon Sand: The only one I know how to do to be fair. So yeah. 

Melelani Oshiro: And I think once you've sort of gotten your eye on the beef animals, , you have a different, a little bit different scale in smaller, smaller ruminants. But you sort of understand, you know, looking at those points, so we look at the back of the animal and look at the, spinous processes of those animals, you're looking at fat and muscle cover over that and the tail head. Yeah. You look at the tail head, you look at the fat cover around there, looking [00:05:00] at the pins and hooks of the animal, so their hips and you look at that, look at how much is exposed in there. And the pins and hooks are hard because like dairy cattle, it's different from beef cattle.

Shannon Sand: Structurally, I feel like dairy cattle are. To me again, but I, I was raised on like farm and ranch. So to me, dairy cattle are much more hard for me to body condition score.

Melelani Oshiro: Yeah, you do have to do and you do have to get your eye trained for it. The other areas we look at is the rib cover and then the brisket of the animal animals mature or laid on fat from the rear to the front, so your tail heads usually start to fill up with fat and on those rump areas, sooner than your brisket will fill in, you use those areas of the animal to assess their body condition score, and you want to have good cover over the ribs. You don't want the ribs showing on an ideal animal.

You're going to have some fat cover over the tail. You want to be able to see the tail and you've, I don't know if you've ever seen these really fat cows where their tail heads sort of disappear, and they kind of just kind of come on over the side. So that's what we're not looking for. [00:06:00] We're looking for some fat cover.

You want to be able to see. see that and it almost looks squishy, having a nice soft covering over the hooks as well, and having good cover over the back. So you don't want to be able to put your hand on them and be able to feel the bones right away. If you want to be able to palpate them and have to put a little bit of pressure in order to kind of feel those different structures across the animal. A lot of times you use body condition scoring and you're not able to put your hands on the animal. So you have to. to sort of train your eye to understand and look and watch in the, in their movement as well, because then you can do another assessment that way and I typically, when I'm having to body condition score beef cattle, when we do the herd at the station, one thing I like to do is I like to see them from all different sides if I can. And then I like to see them move to and away from me because then I can sort of see those structures and kind of give a good score on the animals. So, you know, it does take time.

But if you have the opportunity to score them and then they're going to go into the chute for something and then you can [00:07:00] go ahead and feel them, that's ideal. That's the best way to train 

Shannon Sand: I was going to say, when I first started learning, that was the thing they did for the kids, Yeah, as a child, this was a long time ago, y'all. They would, do them in a group to try and get an idea and people would, we would have basically this discussion and then you would go in and so you could feel what a five felt like, what a six felt like, what a four felt like. Yeah. 

Melelani Oshiro: Yeah. Yeah. So you, yeah. And you sort of look, like I said, with beef cattle, you sort of look at those ideal conditions and, you know, the five, five and a half is usually where you want to be for breeding, for gestation, for when they, they are giving birth and you'll see animals pull down during lactation and during weaning time, but in order for it to bring them back, you want them to be coming back up to a body condition score of at least five prior to getting them bred again, it just helps to improve that conception rates if you had them at a more ideal, 

Shannon Sand: are there other reasons other than re-breed that you might body condition score?

Like is it like [00:08:00] biosecurity or like the herd health? type of are there other health for sure. 

Melelani Oshiro: Yeah, I mean, herd health for sure. So body condition scores are not just important for breeding. As you're saying, they're also important for other things, lactation, if you have an animal in good body condition score, she's going to be lactating enough to be able to support your earlier the 

Shannon Sand: Yeah, because you're right, right after that, that animal doesn't matter whether it's a calf or kid drops on the ground. I was it requires a lot of calories. From that mama animal. I'm going to say animal because I said calf and kid both. So from that mama, goat or cow or whatever animal it is, so they will pull down, like you said, and by pull down, she means that their body condition score may go down by like a half a score or a full score. They have twins, it might be more than that. I mean, and goats have tend to have multiple kids. So, yeah, yeah. 

Melelani Oshiro: Yeah, and so that you kind of look at those stages of production, and that's typically in your animals when you're gonna be [00:09:00] checking a body condition score and this is more so in like your beef or breeding herds. You're going to look at them for maintenance. Where are they in their sort of mid gestation period, getting into late gestation. Those are all these important of production where nutrition can change, and where nutrition plays an important part of their parturition how, you know, the weights of those babies, when they're coming out, when they're going to go back to rebreeding, and then the time when these animals are lactating at their peak points, and when you pull those animals off so that you're having good weaning weights off of those animals that are coming off of your, your mama's and.

You know, so there's important parts, but like, like you said, it's not just about breeding. It's about looking at maintenance of these animals through those production stages, looking at lactation, are they going to be able to support the animal that the calf that they have on their side? And then looking at sort of that late gestation and partrition where that nutritional demand comes really high on the animal outside of your breeding herds now. There's also different stages, right? So you probably want to [00:10:00] address these animals when changing them over into new production areas. If you're having a grass finished system or something like that, using body condition scores is a good way to evaluate if their nutritional requirements are being met out where they are, you know, and you. Don't want to wait until, Oh, you've been out there for three weeks. No address them when they go out there, when you first put them into new pens and then check on them, you know, once a week you go out there or whatnot, or however often it is, take a glance, you can do body condition scoring off of the herd. You know, you just get yourself a sort of average and get your eye trained to be able to assess them. I said that I would think that that's the sort of hardest part is being objective in order, because you know, it isn't, it's not, It's a subjective thing because it's everybody's going to say, yeah, it is.

Everybody's a little 

Shannon Sand: different. And now everybody's 

Melelani Oshiro: always going to have a little bit of different body condition scoring. I've always been told from those that have taught me always say, I'm really mean when I body condition score, cause I'm pretty hard on them. But. You know, it's, it's okay because if you're, if you're the one that's [00:11:00] doing it all the time in your mind that that's what it is, you need to have the basis of what the scores are and understanding how they relate back to the animal and what cover you're looking for on that animal, 

so what particular areas are you looking for the fat cover to be on to be able to assess and assign a certain score to an animal? 

Shannon Sand: If it's a breeding herd, how often, should someone be body condition scoring it? Again, and I, when I say breeding herd, that could be anything. So we could be talking about sheep, goats, pigs, or cattle here.

And I mean, any of these, I know you can body condition score. 

Melelani Oshiro: Typically pre breeding. Late gestation. for them. And typically during kind of mid gestation and just throughout that maintenance period when they're pregnant and then during lactation, and when, especially when they start to hit that peak lactation periods, you want to check on them, make sure that they're being able to maintain with the nutrition that they have in the areas. And, and of course at weaning, and typically you're going to do this is when you're, when you're working the animals, 

you're not, you don't, [00:12:00] Typically you have to go out there specifically just for body condition scoring, but if you're out there checking or moving animals, get yourself going on body condition, scoring them so that you just sort of have, like I said, an eye on them and you sort of learn to train your eye on doing this and, and anytime you have the opportunity, like I said, to bring the animal in, do a body condition score first visually by just looking at them and assign it and, you know, write it down, put it in your phone.

Well, that's what I was going to ask. 

Shannon Sand: It was like, Is it like should they keep a notes app? Yeah. Is there like a Google sheets or an Excel sheet? 

Melelani Oshiro: If you want to do it individually, you could when you when you have the opportunity and the time. Otherwise, at least get a herd average. 

Shannon Sand: Even a herd score, like write a date, a herd score, score it, then write the date and then write it down because I was like, I would probably look at it before I make like, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Melelani Oshiro: Yeah, for sure. I think that's a a good, important thing. And you know, like we were saying, you can do this across species. So cattle have a scoring system of one through nine. I would say [00:13:00] zero, but you know, zero is pretty much. Non relevant. Yeah. At this point, but you know, cattle typically go one to nine and then sheep and goats are typically one through five. And a lot of times you can do half increments on them, right? So a one and a half, two and a half, three and a half and four and a half. Yeah. And that also 

Shannon Sand: depends on the subjectivity of the person scoring it. Exactly. Yeah. I was like finding that some people that are like, I'm not, they are like, we don't do halfs.

Melelani Oshiro: I was like, and I was like that, you know, I'm, I'm kind of like that more so with beef cattle than I am with with sheep and goats. I think I'll go a little bit more on the half scores with them sometimes. Goats, , are a little bit easier to me than sheep, especially if you're dealing with woolly sheep, you got to kind of , yeah, that's what I was going to 

Shannon Sand: say. You can't get them after they've been sheared almost, I would imagine. 

Melelani Oshiro: Cause yeah. Yeah, put them through the race so that you can actually put your hands on them. Goats, you can kind of do, but even them, I'd like to say you put your hands on them, putting them through a race or whatnot until you've really gotten a good, good eye for it. I [00:14:00] mean, you can pick out a one, two, whatever on them pretty easily. But, you know, goats typically ideal are between two and a half. three to four, four is kind of on the heavy end. 

Shannon Sand: Are they one to five then for one to five? Yeah. 

Melelani Oshiro: Yeah. So yeah, five is being pretty much over conditioned right. Animal. And like I call them little tabletops typically when they're at that point, it can't be assigned by simply looking at them as you can with cattle, you know, goats and sheep, you typically have to put your hand on them, feel that lumbar area, looking at the ribs and that loin area, and looking at the cover across them, that's typically how these guys are addressed, and even on the sternum of the animals, looking at the covering around there, We could definitely go through the process, but I think we'll take a lot longer on a podcast to explain these processes across each different animal. But the idea is to give you a, to give you a sort of brief overview of there is a system for all these different species, beef, cattle, dairy, cattle sheep, goats, [00:15:00] poultry. is another one.

Shannon Sand: I was like poultry. Can they? Yeah, 

Melelani Oshiro: yeah, absolutely. And the keelbone, that bone that comes in the center of the breast, you look at the breast muscles on the other side, and you assess the condition of them, poultry have like a zero to three, that's their systems are a lot smaller.

So you essentially want to have a nice rounded if you think of the keelbone, I'm making I'm making hand gestures here. So But 

Shannon Sand: she looks like she's doing like a little triangle shape, a little triangle if you 

Melelani Oshiro: think of it as a triangle, right? And then on those outside sections, if you want it to be rounded, because you want that muscle cover and fat cover to be there for that animal. Yeah. And that assesses their, their body condition. You can pick your bird up and just kind of feel on that keelbone. And if you feel the bone right around that, you mean, you can see it sometimes protruding on some of them.

That's not a good thing. That's not, not a very good body condition. And you want you know, to address these things when you're have laying hands same like any other species, you're going to want to make sure their condition is well for [00:16:00] whatever stage of production. If they're your brood stock, if they're if they're your laying hens or whatnot, you know, anything, or even in your broilers, you still want to take a look at them, 

Shannon Sand: yeah, 

Melelani Oshiro: A good way to assess sort of the condition of your birds. 

Shannon Sand: So is there like a place to go if people are wanting to learn more about how to start body condition scoring like whether that's poultry or sheep or goats or cattle are there different resources for those or like if someone wants to start learning to do it obviously you kind of just need to go out there but like are there guides or I know you've taught body condition scoring on cattle sometimes but are there other people?

Are there possible courses online or like even

Melelani Oshiro: I wouldn't say there's courses But there's quite a few different extension publications. Okay and i'll link up some sources. Okay in our notes as well. There is our body condition scoring video. That's on our leg youtube channel That goes to the beef the beef cattle one and You know, that might be a good idea, Shannon.

Maybe I need to make a couple other videos and looking at sheep and goats. And there's a couple of 

Shannon Sand: [00:17:00] healthy videos, 

Melelani Oshiro: Susan showing that was on our podcast before, I believe they have a very good set of documents on goat and sheep for body condition scoring. So I'll put those in our show notes, but yeah, it's not.

It's not a hard thing to do, but it does take a little while for you to train. Yeah. And practice to get your eyes sort of trained at what you're looking at them, especially for sheeping goats, because you're, you're going to have to put your hands on them. Beef cattle, you could do a visual assessment of them on their body condition scores, if you, you know, you're comfortable in doing it. So. This is a great tool. It's a free tool. That you can use to really help understand and evaluate your animal's condition, their growing conditions, even if it's just for maintenance for the animals, but understanding that aspect of are there nutritional requirements being met, you know, and that's essentially what you use, the body condition scores for beef cattle.

It's a great way to [00:18:00] sort of address them out in the field. So if you know, Hey, these animals are going to market an X amount of days to make sure they're reaching these weights and you can look at their conditions, I believe between body condition scores is 75 pounds between each. Don't quote me on that, but it it's you, there's a specific amount of pounds between each body condition score. So if you know, you put your animals out at. Four and you're aiming to get them up to a six, you can sort of assess, you know, they're going to gain X amount of pounds every day. You can use sort of use that, and then go out there and be like, well, they're at a four. So maybe they're now they're at a five. Okay. We're at this point now. 

Shannon Sand: Or if they're only at a four and a half and you're like, Oh, usually they're somewhere, but the grass is still green and looks good. Maybe there's something else they're missing.

Yeah, I was like, I think it can give key indicators like that as well. Kind of again, those are just things that people I think pick up over time though. 

Melelani Oshiro: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's just a good overall tool that you can learn to use. We'll put some guides for you [00:19:00] in the show notes. And it really, is a good tool to use to just give an overall. view of health of the animals, understanding all those types of things. And I think sometimes we overlook it to want to say something else is going on and whatnot in the animals where, hey, we just look at the body condition score of them. Something is going on, but it's not always necessarily related to disease or something, you know, on that health wise. It could just be nutritional 

Shannon Sand: again, you know, sometimes like you're like, Oh, the grass looks green. The cows look good, but they're not where they were last year. At the same time, 

Melelani Oshiro: if you put them out and you say, Hey, they're at a four.

Now I come back out here and wow, they're looking closer to a three. Something's going on. 

Shannon Sand: Something's going on. Yeah. 

Melelani Oshiro: It's a good tool to be able to use and we'll put some resources down there and hey, if you guys want more information about a particular species or want us to go through details on how to do this on a certain species of animals, reach out to us.

Happy to do that. And yeah, just also want to remind everyone that 

Shannon Sand: we can force Mele to get her birds out. That would be fun. 

Melelani Oshiro: Yeah. We did do [00:20:00] body condition scoring our poultry workshop that we did and it was a good way for them to just assess those animals. It's a good way to kind of make sure your animals are receiving the nutritional requirements that they need to be able to meet those different areas of production that they're in. And like I said, reach out if you want more information and we'll share those links in our show notes for you.

Shannon Sand: Absolutely. Anything else, Mele? 

Melelani Oshiro: Not that I can think of. 

Shannon Sand: Okay. 

Melelani Oshiro: Unless you got another question for me. I don't know. 

Shannon Sand: No, I mean, if you give me long enough, I can come up with something, but well, thank you Mele for joining us and thank you everybody so much today for listening. We hope you all found this informative and that it will be useful to you.

Melelani Oshiro: Yeah, hopefully it'll be useful. But make sure to follow us on our social media pages, the Livestock Wala'au and Livestock Extension Group. If you haven't already, be sure to visit the UH CTAHR Extension website and our YouTube channel listed in the show notes. 

Shannon Sand: That's right. And for additional information about this topic, like Mellie said, see the show notes of the podcast and description box [00:21:00] of our YouTube page. Thank you for listening to the Livestock Wala'au before we go, show some love for your favorite podcasts. That's us. By leaving us a review wherever you listen to this and then stay tuned for the next episode. 

Melelani Oshiro: Yep. Thanks again to our sponsors, the Livestock Extension Group of the University of Hawaii Mānoa, College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, the Center for Ag Profitability and the University of Nebraska Lincoln, and the Western Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program.

Mahalo for listening, a hui hou. 

Shannon Sand: A hui hou! A hui hou!