It’s always exciting when new calves arrive. You want to do everything you can to help your newborns thrive and grow. One of the critical first steps in ensuring overall health is to feed enough high-quality colostrum in the first 24 hours of life, as calves are born with no antibodies to fight dangerous organisms.

“That depends,” you say. “Are you talking about comparing the two liquids or whether colostrum feeding affects future production?” Both, I say.

When walking through calf barns and hutches during the winter, it is somewhat difficult to differentiate sickness behavior from cold-stress behavior. Interestingly, calf behaviors are quite similar when they are struggling with a disease challenge and when they are battling cold weather. In young calves, both stressors decrease activity and reduce thriftiness of appearance.

So which came first, the chicken or the egg? In her presentation at the Professional Dairy Producers of Wisconsin’s Calf Care Connection event last October, Dr. Sandra Godden, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine, likened the question of calf-feeding systems versus housing systems to this age-old quandary.

Highly contagious, both Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus agalactiae are considered major mastitis pathogens that can significantly impact dairy producers economically. For the most part, these pathogens cause subclinical intramammary infections that quite often become chronic, John Middleton of the University of Missouri told attendees at the National Mastitis Council regional meeting in Ghent, Belgium, held Aug. 4-6, 2014. Sometimes, though, they can be associated with a high incidence of clinical disease.

In 2013, researchers from Michigan State University, Penn State, Mississippi State University and Florida A&M set out to formulate a quality milk assessment for the prevention of mastitis and reduction of antibiotic use on dairy farms.

Mastitis remains the most costly problem in the dairy industry after decades of research with intense focus on management practices and the introduction of modern equipment. Published research reveals that one-third of all dairy cows are estimated to have mastitis and that 50 percent of cows in Canada and the U.S. have one or more infected quarters.