Area college students to help research effects of smoke

A team of University of Idaho, Lewis-Clark State College and Washington State University veterinary students will join a research team to study how wildfire smoke affects dairy cows and other animals.

The research will be funded by a four-year, $771,596 National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and builds upon a prior project that found milk production dropped significantly following an especially smoky period of the summer of 2020.

In addition to analyzing physiological changes among groups of cows exposed to natural smoke, the study will compare measures of health between a control group of cows breathing clean air and a group of cows kept in smoke chambers, where they’ll be exposed to particulates. The aim of the smoke chamber research is to confirm whether smoke exposure is truly a cause of lost productivity and deteriorating health.

Pedram Rezamand and Denise Konetchy with UI’s Department of Animal, Veterinary and Food Sciences; Jeffrey Abbott, with Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine; and Oregon State University dairy management researcher Jenifer Cruickshank are co-principal investigators on the project. Other team members include Alistair Smith, with UI’s Department of Earth and Spatial Sciences; WSU veterinarian Craig McConnel; and J.R. Kok, an HVAC instructor with Lewis-Clark State College.

The team will seek to identify genetic markers associated with inflammation, and they’ll look for changes in tissue morphology and structure of smoke-exposed cows. They plan to build eight smoke chambers at the dairy on the Moscow campus. Kok will lead development of the system of ducts and dampers to pipe in the smoke.

In prior research, team members found that every increase of 100 micrograms per meter of particulates due to smoke correlated with a 2.5-pound decrease in daily milk production per animal. The researchers will be simulating particulate levels of 150 micrograms per meter, with eight hours of daily exposure, in the smoke chambers. The smoke chamber research will be conducted during the spring, when wildfires don’t usually occur, to avoid any natural smoke skewing the results.

A second tier of research will evaluate physiological changes affecting the immune system of lactating cows exposed to natural smoke, while a third research tier will assess the effectiveness of air filters designed to filter traffic-related air pollution at protecting the health of cows.

They’ll assess heifer calves exposed to natural wildfire smoke, studying the calves after a couple of weeks and after one year to understand long-term effects. They’ll also study bull calves exposed to smoke in a smoke chamber. Based on their prior research, they concluded smoke affects eye discharge, coughing, respiration rates and immune cell populations in calves.

Based on the cumulative results, the team hopes to make recommendations regarding the use of air filters, the best housing configurations to protect cows, air ventilation, nutritional intervention, boosting immunity and anti-inflammatory medications.

The project is called “Wildfire Smoke and the Dairy Industry; Impacts on Animal Performance and Health and Molecular and Cellular Mechanisms Involved.”