Anyone involved in dairy farming knows the frustration of a mastitis infection. It’s costly – maybe your favorite cow was culled too soon or your milk premiums took a hit. One clinical mastitis case alone is shown to cost $444 during the first 30 days in milk.

A contagious disease once seen as a “California problem” has now crept into every major dairy-producing state in the U.S., and it’s wreaking havoc on infected young calves and adult cows.

Subclinical ketosis: The quiet milk thief, sickening cows and frustrating farmers nationwide. The bad news: Detecting it effectively and efficiently on-farm can be costly and challenging.

Ensuring your cows are healthy will improve their productivity, longevity, fertility and resistance to disease, along with reducing the costs of upkeep. A key to this well-being is controlling and limiting their stress.

Within fat cells, fatty acids are stored as triglyceride molecules and constitute one of the main energy reserves that are mobilized during times of negative energy balance, such as the transition period. Fat mobilization is the metabolic process that cows use to either release or store fatty acids within fat cells.

Advances in genetics, nutrition and management have led to larger increases in milk production per cow over the past 40 years. These production increases have also led to growing heat stress problems for lactating and close-up cows in warm weather.

In his fifth edition of Dairy Cattle and Milk Production published in 1939, Dr. Clarence Eckles reported that the “ratio between the human population and the number of cows in the United States had remained essentially the same since 1850.” At that time, there were 36 million dairy cows in the U.S. producing an average of 8,700 pounds of milk per lactation.

Dairy cows need water to turn feed into milk – a product that is already nearly 90 percent water. Achieving ideal water intake comes down to two criteria: quantity and quality.

Bedding choice directly influences cow comfort, but the decision on which material to put underneath cows must consider several other factors, such as cost, availability, ease of handling, udder health, pathogen growth and more.

Nuisance flies are a vector of disease and an irritant to cattle and workers on a dairy operation. Because of the confined nature of a dairy, it is important to use an integrated pest management (IPM) program for effectively controlling fly populations.