This month’s VAS DC305 tip is on clinical mastitis. Clinical mastitis is a very costly disease. Although poor milk procedures, dirty environments and faulty equipment can predispose cows, most mastitis is caused by an infectious agent. Treatment of mastitis (MAST event in DC305) caused by certain bacteria is not improved by antibiotic therapy, so not treating those cows will decrease antibiotic use, decrease hospital days and decrease milk withheld from sale.

This month’s VAS DC305 tip is on parlor performance. Using the parlor performance reports in DC305 helps you take advantage of many of the benefits of daily milk meters plus look for cows that fail to produce the expected amount of milk.

Lameness can be the most costly disease on dairies, even more so than mastitis. This is due to the high incidence of lameness on dairies. It is not uncommon to find 30 percent yearly incidence or higher on dairies. Yet lameness is one of the least entered and tracked disease.

This month’s VAS DC305 tip is a tool that can help you achieve the ultimate goal on every dairy, to preserve food quality.

This month’s VAS DC305 tip is a module that estimates the value of each cow in the herd relative to an average fresh heifer.

This month’s tip is a continuation of last month’s tip. Last month, we looked at preg risk, and this month, we are looking at conception risk. Both are tools that can help you examine the effectiveness of your breeding program.

This month’s VAS DC305 tip is a tool that can help you examine the effectiveness of your breeding program: BREDSUM.

This month’s VAS DC305 tip is a tool that can help you track events and when they are happening by month, month of freshening and days in milk (DIM). You can also use it to analyze calf sex, calf mortality and twinning.

This month’s VAS DC305 tip is a tool you can use to help monitor protocol compliance and analyze disease incidence and reproduction.

I am happy to now be providing a VAS DC305 tip each month. It will usually be something more advanced in DC305 that is beneficial for monitoring and managing your dairy herd, but not necessarily something everyone may be familiar with.