Donor cows give beef calves a second
chance with plasma transfusions

By Mavis Fodness

Plasma transfusions often save human lives. Now its increasing use in the beef industry is also allowing newborn beef calves a second chance at life.

Veterinarian Erin deKoning performed her first plasma transfusion five years ago, thanks to a beef producer who brought a sick calf to the Luverne clinic for treatment.

“The first time was purely experimental, and luckily we had a long-time producer who was willing to go along with the experiment,” said deKoning, who is entering her 17th year of veterinary practice.

A simple total protein blood test revealed the week-old calf was low on protein. The low level was due to a failure of passive transfer (FPT), which occurs when a newborn doesn’t receive their mother’s protein-rich colostrum within 12 hours of birth.

DeKoning suspected a plasma transfer would increase the calf’s protein levels and energy level, if only a sufficient donor cow was available.

In her first case, deKoning said the owner brought the cow along with the sick calf. Blood was collected from the cow and its plasma was given via intravenously to the calf.

Plasma is the straw-colored liquid that is left when blood’s red and white blood cells are removed. Plasma is full of immunoglobulin antibodies, proteins and necessary electrolytes that can boost a low immune system.

Results of deKoning’s first plasma transfusion had positive results.

“Upon receiving the plasma, the calf perked up, thrived, was weaned that fall and went on to be fed out at the producer’s feedlot,” she said.

Since then, 50 percent of the FPT calves treated by the clinic have been saved thanks to plasma donations. The success rate continues to grow as the treatment becomes a more accepted treatment by producers and transfusions are becoming a common treatment for calves under one week of age.

DeKoning said the clinic averaged 10 plasma transfusions since 2021. That number rose this year due to the increased value of a newborn calf.

“Currently bottle calves straight off the cow are $1,500 to $1,600 or more depending on the area of the country,” she said. “We choose this treatment to save the calf and boost the immune system to help it thrive for the rest of its life.”

Cost of a plasma transfusion ranges from $250 to $300.

Key to a successful plasma transfusion starts with the cow. If the calf’s mother is not available, a donor is used. Keeping an adequate supply of bovine plasma on hand has become a standard practice at the Luverne clinic.

As fate would have it, cow-calf operations are popular enterprises among the employees at the Rock Veterinary Clinic. Beef cows owned by deKoning, and veterinary technicians Rylie Gens and Lexy Schiebout supply beef plasma for clients during the months-long calving season.

“As long as it (plasma) is frozen, it will keep for at least a year, if not more,” deKoning said. “But we have never carried plasma over a year since we use it that fast.”

Donor cows have become primary suppliers for the clinic’s donor supply.

Rock Veterinary staff recently celebrated one such donor cow on their social media page. Jenny is a 5 year-old Hereford/Angus cross owned by Schiebout, who is beginning her 11th year working at the clinic.

Jenny gave her first blood donation in March.
“She happened to need to come to the clinic for other reasons so I volunteered her for a blood donation,” Schiebout said. “She was in at the right time — being about one to two months from calving and our plasma supply was running low.”

The docile Jenny allowed Schiebout to draw enough blood for five plasma infusions for FPT calves. The donation process takes 20- to 30-minutes and Jenny suffered no ill effects.

Collected in half-liter bags, the donated blood is ideally kept in the clinic’s cooler for 14 days to allow the blood products to separate and the plasma can be easily drawn off for use. In emergencies, the whole blood can be separated in small batches using a centrifuge.

A plasma transfusion to a beef calf takes about 15 minutes. 

Cows like Jenny can safely donate blood once per month.

“However, we prefer donors to be in a specific window between scour vaccination and one to two months pre-calving,” Schiebout said.

For cows like Jenny, this window only occurs once per year with results of the five plasma infusions from Jenny unknown.

“It is difficult to determine how many calves her plasma saved as we don’t always receive feedback from producers once the recipient calves go home,” Schiebout said. “The donors (like Jenny) have always gone on to have healthy calves with no issues.”

Similar to human volunteers who donate blood, the cow nor its owners receive payments.

“We simply do it in hopes that even one more calf can go on to live a happy, healthy life and fulfill its purpose to feed the world or become a productive member of the herd,” Schiebout said.

In Jenny’s social media post, clinic employees likened her to fictional super heroes like Superman or Batman.

“Some heroes were capes…some where ear tags,” the post read.

By Mavis Fodness

Since 2002, Murray County 4-H’ers had access to quality and affordable sheep to show at the August county fair in Slayton.

That access came through the late Dave Herrig, who offered youth enrolled in the county’s sheep project the opportunity to purchase and raise lambs they would later show at the county fair. As part of the opportunity, he’d mentor the youth and their families on the proper care and how to prepare market sheep for the show.

The programs proved to be successful in removing cost barriers that often prevented 4-H’ers from owning and showing livestock.

When Dave died in May 2025, the programs’ futures were in jeopardy.

According to Kim Hause, Murray County Extension educator, organizers decided that the adopt a lamb and lottery lamb programs will continue in Dave’s memory.

“Any time you can remove barriers, that is a program worth investing time in,” she said. “Dave was great about calling the families and checking in, as well as making the rounds to get to know the 4-H youth.”

Adopt a lamb began in 2002 and is open to first- and second-year sheep project members who may not have had the ability or the know-how to obtain and care for sheep themselves.

Lottery lamb began almost seven years after the adopt a lamb program and is open to all sheep project members.

For both programs, lambs of similar in size and breeding were selected with the purchase price set at the current market rate. This year, the cost is $350 per head. In March, the 4-H’ers draw numbers to see which of the 70- to 80-pound lambs they would take home and raise for exhibit at the late August county sheep show.

In the 24 years since the inception of the adopt a lamb program, Hause estimated more than 100 youth have participated.

In recent years, however, the program averages five to eight new 4-H’ers to the sheep project.
“According to Dave, if there were five more kids who learned something about raising sheep each year and that, for him, was a win,” Hause said.
Dave did not build the two Murray County 4-H programs by himself. Son, Jake, shared his dad’s passion for raising and showing sheep.

Jake, a former Murray County 4-H’er himself, continues to organize the purchase of the black-face market lambs for both programs. He’s also stepped into his father’s shoes as a mentor.
“Because buying an animal is not even half the project,” Jake said. “It’s the way you feed them and train them that actually makes it successful.”
Jake knows first hand what can be achieved when the work is completed every day.

He was 10 when his mom, Jan, and his dad purchased the family’s first lambs in 1993. As a 4-H’er, Jake regularly exhibited as many as 24 sheep at the Murray County Fair each year until he aged out of the program nine years later.

“The master plan was, when I graduated, we would sell all the sheep then we’d use all that money for college,” Jake said. “But the year I graduated (high school), we built the new barn.”

The family business, Herrig Hamps and Southdowns, grew to showing and selling their home-grown sheep nationwide. Jake continues raising quality seed stock from a herd of 70 ewes on his acreage near Burbank, S.D.

The adopt a lamb and lottery lamb programs developed after sheep numbers began to decline after Jake graduated from 4-H. Jake’s continued involvement in the Murray County 4-H sheep project illustrates his dad’s lessons of hard work with home-grown sheep can leave lasting impacts with participants.

Troy and Brenda Wehking of Avoca had front-row seats to the Murray County program’s purpose to supply quality sheep at an affordable cost for 4-H’ers. Both of their daughters, Emma and Olivia, each spent 13 years in the sheep project as participants in the adopt a lamb and lottery lamb programs.

Brenda, a former Freeborn County 4-H’er and sheep judge, appreciated the Herrig family’s dedication to the sheep industry, especially when she was looking for livestock that her daughters could easily care for and show themselves.
The mentorship from the Herrig family has been priceless.

Their youngest daughter, Olivia, now a college sophomore, participated in her last sheep show in August 2025.

Brenda noticed how seriously her daughters embraced the work ethic Dave Herrig emphasized through his mentorship. Designating sheep care as a daily priority was not something busy high schoolers would often manage effectively. 

However, the Wehking girls were very effective in establishing a routine that put the animals first.
“They spent a couple of hours, especially in the summer time, every single day with those lambs,” Brenda said. “Just knew the work ethic they had to put into it in order to have a good product for the fair.”

County fair judges noticed the Wehking girls’ hard work and rewarded their efforts raising a $350 lamb with the much coveted trips to the Minnesota State Fair. The Wehking girls’ trips to urban St. Paul provided life experiences beyond winning awards and ribbons, it was a chance to share their hard work and share with others an experience they also won’t soon forget.

“Their favorite thing was taking the lambs out on a halter and walking down the streets and having all the people gather around them and ask questions and pet a lamb for the first time ever in their lives,” Brenda said. “That’s what they loved.”

By Mavis Fodness

A time-consuming spring planting chore is becoming easier thanks to TerraClear Inc., who recently opened an office in Sioux Falls.
While glaciers flattened much of the land in the tri-state area, making it ideal for row crops, the left-behind rocks are reminders of the ice sheets that spread across the Midwest thousands of years ago.
“Glaciers weren’t really nice to us, for a lack of a better way to put it,” said Josh Ring, the sales and enablement leader in TerraClear’s Sioux Falls office.
TerraClear’s rock management takes advantage of the technology advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and global positioning to identify rocks in a field and develop a map to pick rocks up in a matter of hours versus over a period of days.

Ring recalled working as a farmhand in the 1990s in southeast South Dakota, where he completed rock picking in the traditional way — walking an entire field.

“Basically, from sunup to sundown, walking fields, looking left to right, trying to find what we could find,” Ring said. “Stooping, scooping, standing, walking over, and throwing it (rocks) back into buckets. If we found something too large, we’d flag it and come back with a backhoe at a later time.”
While the Brandon, S.D. native said rock picking paid well and the large rock piles left him with satisfaction of a job well done, today’s teens are less likely to pick rocks for days.

TerraClear’s AI-generated maps are making rock picking three times faster.

The first step is to create a TerraClear account and upload the boundaries for the field-specific mapping process.

Once an account is created, a pilot flies a drone over the field. Fields free of snow and excessive ground cover provide the best view for identifying rocks.

“We are able to identify rocks that are 7 inches or larger and (those that are exposed),” said Ring, explaining what exposed means, “hey, that’s an 8-inch rock there but actually it’s much larger underneath.”

Mapping can take place in the fall as well as the spring, the most common timeframe. Maps can be utilized whenever a block of time presents itself for rock removal.

“Because of the eagle-eye view we have with our drone, we are going to identify more (rocks) than the human eye in a side-by-side, looking left to right, or even sitting up in the tractor looking left to right,” Ring said.

Completion of the high-resolution map takes three to 10 days depending on flying conditions and if an internet connection is close to the field’s location. Once the map is available, the information is placed in the TerraClear account.

Various filters can be applied to the map to identify rocks by size as well as a path to pick up the rocks.
At $3.95 an acre, TerraClear’s rock management could easily pay for itself, as Ring explained a local farmer’s harvest experience with a single rock.
“An 8-inch rock got kicked up past the rock gate and got ingested by the combine,” he said. “It caused about $180,000 in damage to his combine and they had that down time where he’s waiting for that to get repaired.”

Ring indicated many farmers have repeated mapping the following year when switching crops to eliminate more rock, as the Midwest’s freeze-thaw cycle continues to bring more rocks to the surface for the next year.

To further assist with rock removal, TerraClear also has a rock-picking service.

Ring said farmers have chosen to hire a TerraClear crew to remove the 10-inch or larger rocks, while farmers collected the smaller rocks themselves when time allowed.

“Time to pick is valuable,” Ring said.

About TerraClear
TerraClear was founded by Brent Frei, a mechanical engineer, in late 2017.

The Grangeville, Idaho, native sought a more efficient way to pick up rocks other than by hand or by rock picking equipment.

According to the TerraClear website, Frei’s focus turned to rock locating rather than develop better collection equipment to better work on all types of terrain.

TerraClear has offices in Sioux Falls, Parkersburg, Iowa, Issaquah, Wash., and Grangeville, Idaho.
More information is available at terraclear.com or by calling the sales office at 712-545-7144.

Facility turns 45,
Pioneer brand marks a century

The crew at Corteva Agriscience’s Jackson Seed Production Facility has a lot to celebrate in 2026.
Plant staff will not only celebrate 45 years of operation in Jackson’s industrial park, but also mark 100 years of Pioneer seed, the global flagship brand of Corteva Agriscience.

Both the Jackson plant and the Pioneer seed brand have humble roots.

The Jackson plant began with seven employees processing seed beans grown on 10,000 acres in eastern Jackson County back in 1981. Today, it is a key part of Corteva’s extensive seed and crop protection network.

The Pioneer seed brand began on a small farm owned by Henry and Ilo Wallace in Johnson, Iowa, back in 1926. Founded as Hi-Bred Corn Co. — and later dubbed “Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Co.” — the business was the first in the world develop, grow and sell hybrid seed corn. By the 1930s, Pioneer had expanded sales across the United States, becoming a leading supplier of hybrid seed corn.

The company began international sales, research and seed production in the 1950s and ’60s, then changed its name to Pioneer Hi-Bred International and established a separate overseas subsidiary in 1970. DuPont purchased 20 percent of Pioneer Hi-Bred International in 1997, then the remaining shares in 1999. In 2018, DuPont Pioneer became part of the Agriculture Division of DowDuPont, then part of standalone agriculture company Corteva Agriscience in 2019.

Caroline Ahn, global media relations representative for Corteva, said Pioneer has pioneered a number of innovations over the years. It launched the first million-unit corn product in 1947, the first insect-protected corn in 2010, the first drought-tolerance native trait in corn in 2011 and the first biotech high oleic oil soybeans in 2012. She said Pioneer brand Z-Series soybean variety P49Z02E is the world’s top-yielding soybean variety, Pioneer P14830VYHR is the world’s top-yielding corn hybrid and Pioneer brand 86G42 is the world’s top-yielding dryland sorghum variety.

Today, Pioneer brand seed is sold is around 70 countries across the globe and is the top corn and soybean brand in the United States.