Imagine this scenario: You produce high-quality milk. You take pride in receiving your quality premiums for low preliminary incubation (PI) counts. Your system is clean, you use high-quality chemicals in the right amounts, and you check that your wash cycles are running correctly on a regular basis.

What do you see? This is a very simple phrase, but it is very difficult for many people to really “see” when they walk through a parlor, barn or a complete dairy facility. It takes effort to train yourself to look past the obvious, to see things that can have a direct impact on milk production and milk quality.

The cost of treating a case of clinical mastitis averages $100 in many dairies and exceeds $200 in some. The use of antibiotics for treating mastitis is responsible for the majority of this cost – not because of the cost of the antibiotics but mainly because of discarded milk.

Idaho veterinarian Mark Kirkpatrick recently encouraged producers who are using regular DHIA testing to harness the power of the data they are collecting to improve their dairy operations, especially to improve disease monitoring and evaluation of the impacts on milk production. Kirkpatrick, a managing technical service veterinarian for Zoetis, spoke in December at Idaho DHIA’s annual meeting in Twin Falls, Idaho.

The Dairy Practices Council had a successful annual conference in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Nov. 6-8, 2013. There were approximately 118 people in attendance. Prior to the conference, on November 5, a workshop titled “Food Safety Workshop for Artisan Cheesemakers and Small-Scale Dairy Processors” was held.

Rising conspicuously smack-dab in the middle of Oregon’s wine country near Dayton are two large, blue manure-slurry holding tanks with expandable tops – methane digesters – erected in 2012 at Forest Glen Jerseys. It’s a $2.4 million facility.

Pure bacterial cultures fed a synthetic sugar substrate made from processed corn can make polyhydroxyalkanoate, or PHA, a biodegradable plastic.