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For the last few years, agriculture has been discussing the terms animal welfare, animal rights, animal husbandry, animal handling and stockmanship.
They all have unique meanings and nuances to different audiences. Stockmanship is a term more common in the beef cattle industry and can be defined as the art and science of handling cattle, or any other farm animal, properly.
For many dairy owners and employees, stockmanship skills have been honed over time and become intuitive. Others working with dairy animals have old habits or simply lack adequate training.
Managing Salmonella disease is all about reducing risk. No dairy will ever be exempt from disease exposure, because Salmonella is sneaky and can enter a dairy herd through a number of ways.
Recent cattle purchases or heifers that have returned from a grower can carry disease. The boots or clothing of visitors or workers from a neighboring farm also presents a risk.
Even rodents and birds nesting throughout the barn or hovering around feed bring the possibility of the spread of Salmonella bacteria to an operation.
No one questions the need for teat dip. It’s one of the most important products in the milking parlor and a key to protecting your cows’ udder health and your dairy’s milk quality.
But the amount of iodine in commercial teat dip formulations is very much up for debate these days. The question is whether dairymen are getting what they’re paying for, says Allan Britten, president and laboratory director at Udder Health Systems.
“It may not be an issue of efficacy or cow safety or animal health, but of value,” Britten says.
Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series.
Traditional bacterial culture has been the “gold standard” method for the identification of mastitis-causing bacteria for many years.
However, traditional culture is a slow and time-consuming process that allows dairy cattle with subclinical or clinical mastitis to commingle with their herdmates, potentially allowing for the spread of contagious mastitis bacteria.
Mark Thomas is a registered dairy producer and fourth-generation owner of Maplebranch Farm in Middlebury, Indiana. He farms with his two brothers, and his son is working on the farm as well.
The farm maintains a herd of 260 Jersey and Holstein cows, for both dairying and showing.
Success depends on keeping the herd healthy and milk quality high. Mark says by focusing on those two areas it makes the herd easier to work with and more profitable. He shares the five things he finds most valuable to herd health and milk quality.
We’re a few months into the new 400,000 somatic cell count (SCC) limit for milk used for export to the European Union (EU). The USDA made it official on January 1. So, what have you done differently on your operation?
The measurement is made based on a three-month average and doesn’t apply to all milk – only milk that will be sold to the European Union.
While some of us may dislike the added regulation and increased recordkeeping by milk haulers and processors, producing a higher-quality product benefits customers and cows. Lower somatic cell counts mean increased production for our cows and increased shelf life for consumers.
Mastitis is one of the most common diseases affecting dairy operations as a detriment to cow comfort and, ultimately, profitability.
Traditionally, dairymen have relied on a five-point plan to control the disease that focuses primarily on sanitation and proper treatment of the herd.
But Dr. Stephen C. Nickerson, head of the Animal and Dairy Science Department at the University of Georgia, thinks there is one area that deserves greater consideration.
Editor’s note: The following commentary is in response to the article “Use an index to help you rethink lameness prevention,” written by Vic Daniel and published in the March 21, 2012 issue of Progressive Dairyman. Click here to read more about this topic.
In the 1980s Karen Mortensen, a Danish researcher, introduced the concept of lameness being a “multifactorial problem.” That theme, I suggest, is the same as the recently published article by Vic Daniel, which was thought-provoking and timely.
Stress
Daniel’s article reminds us that lameness does not have just one cause, but is initiated by a number of different interrelated factors.
A May 8 webinar offered dairy producers advice and reminders about preventing lameness. The hour-and-a-half presentation featured Penn State Extension Veterinarian Ernest Hovingh and Extension Dairy Team member Dan McFarland, an engineer, and explored the relationship between flooring, footing and lameness.
“It’s not quite as simple as saying there’s one individual thing that determines whether or not a cow becomes lame,” Hovingh says. “It’s almost always an interaction between a number of different factors.”
University of Illinois chemist Wilfred van der Donk (right) has identified a chemical compound that could be the next frontier in mastitis treatment. The synthetic compound, geobacillin, is similar to a natural mastitis-fighting compound, nisin, which is made in a cow’s udder.
A commercial form of nisin for mastitis treatment is currently under FDA review and a decision is expected soon. (Read an update about this drug’s approval status below.)
Research initially shows the new compound to be even more potent than nisin against at least one bacterial strain that causes mastitis. Progressive Dairyman Editor Walt Cooley talked with Van der Donk about his discovery.
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