Every time you need to treat cattle for bovine respiratory disease (BRD), it’s clear what it’s costing you in medication. Treating BRD can be costly, but trying to cut expenses with a cheaper antibiotic alone might not lower your costs. If the cheaper antibiotic isn’t as effective for treating BRD, this could mean even greater costs down the road, including:
- Labor spending more time pulling and re-treating cattle and you spending more time managing more BRD re-treatments and your labor
- Purchasing more doses of medications for re-treatments
- Chronic BRD negatively impacting your cost of gain, average daily gain and return value of your cattle and possibly contributing to a higher death loss
- These additional costs for treating BRD might be cutting into your profitability more than what you might see on the surface.
Our easy new BRD Cost Calculator at BRD-Solutions.com can help you estimate all your costs — and potential economic losses — of BRD based on your current BRD management program. The calculator allows you to enter information that’s specific to your operation and cattle and then calculate costs for either treating or controlling BRD. In addition to medication costs for initial BRD treatment, the calculator factors in other costs from BRD, including additional re-treatment medication costs, additional labor time and costs of administering re-treatments, and performance and death losses, based on national averages.
So, why is understanding your costs of treating BRD so important? The more you know about your current BRD management program, the more informed you’ll be to make improvements. You’ll be more informed for management, prevention and treatment decisions that can help better manage BRD, minimize your economic losses and maximize cattle health and productivity on your operation.
Unmanaged BRD comes at a huge cost, but it could cost your operation less if you manage it more effectively and choose the right antibiotic first if you need to treat it.
Learn more about managing BRD at BRD-Solutions.com from Zoetis.
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