Cooling is necessary; it’s just not sufficient, writes Andrew Hunt. His article is one to study and share with dairy producers. Just one heat event starts a cascade resulting in milk losses.
Only about a third of summer milk loss traces back to reduced intake. The rest comes from a gut–immune cascade cooling fans can’t touch. When a cow shunts blood from her gut to dump heat, tight junctions loosen, LPS leaks into circulation, and the Warburg effect kicks in: her immune system burns more than a kilogram of glucose in 12 hours that the mammary gland needed for milk synthesis.
Hunt shares study results in this actionable article, relating a growing body of U.S. dairy research points somewhere earlier in the chain — leaky gut. The idea is that those cows walked into the fight already worn down, their gut barriers leaking and their immune systems half spent, before a single pathogen ever reached the teat canal.
Source: The Bullvine, June 16, 2026. Link. Producers blame the bedding, the milkers and the flies but research points to glucose being pulled elsewhere — and that somewhere else turns out to be the immune system, fed by a gut that had begun to leak.
Rhoads and Baumgard proved it: cut intake to match a heat-stressed cow, and you can explain only about a third of her milk drop. The rest leaks out through her gut.”
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