Anyone remember the old Dunkin’ Donut commercials, “Time to make doughnuts”? The commercial dramatized the constant attention and long hours required to bake fresh doughnuts every morning. We received a call from a dairy producer in North Dakota that felt the same way about changing his inflations as the doughnut guy did about making doughnuts. “Time to change the inflations.” It was to the point that the producer was spending way too much time and money maintaining his milking equipment.

TRENDING TOPIC ARTICLE: HERD HEALTH Published: September 22, 2010 print issue In this article, University of Kentucky’s Jeffrey Bewley outlines several ways producers can achieve and maintain low somatic cell count milk, including adjusting milking protocols and culturing high-SCC cows. or scroll down to jump to the article. Because this article was so popular, we asked Bewley, “Of the best management practices you outlined, which practice do you think producers and employees most struggle with?” Bewley says, “Of those management practices listed, I think using bacteriological cultures is the most underutilized. So much information can be obtained from culturing milk samples. On-farm culturing systems make this practice even more useful.

One of the critical time frames in a cow’s life is around the time before and after calving. Proper dry cow nutrition and management is critical, since decisions made during this period will have a tremendous impact on milk production and health during the next lactation. As producers begin to think about the next fall harvesting season, it is important also to keep in mind how the cows coming into lactation will be affected by season and the potential new forages that will be provided to this group.

The battle with mastitis has always been an on-going, difficult challenge for the dairy producer. Research shows that in addition to the $150 economic loss per diagnosed case of mastitis from discarded milk, antibiotic treatment, decreased production and time spent managing treatment, mastitis also takes a toll on the dairy cow’s reproductive success. Several studies support the detrimental effects of mastitis, including research from the University of Tennessee. This study’s objective was to identify the presence and strength of the relationship between mastitis and reproduction within a 758-cow Jersey herd. Reproduction data was collected and analyzed over a 10-year period.

Larger dairy units and the introduction of automatic milking systems will increasingly emphasize the importance of reducing risks for lameness, since immobile animals will not fit into a system with low labor input. Despite much effort to reduce lameness worldwide, treatments of lameness do not seem to subside. Previously there was a general assumption that the cow’s feet environment was of primary concern for the outcome of lameness. Hygiene was the final message to prevent infectious claw diseases. At that time, herd problems with digital dermatitis (DD) exploded and were blamed as a cause for most lameness problems.

“Drug misuse on dairy cows prompts federal warning,” Star Tribune, Nov. 21, 2009 Newspaper headlines such as the above are becoming too common. The Star Tribune published an article in November 2009 recounting the reprimand of two local Minnesota dairy producers by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for sending cows to slaughter with “dangerously high” violative drug residue levels in their system.

Johne’s disease remains a significant threat to the dairy industry worldwide, even though knowledge and tools are available to effectively relegate these bacteria back to their native environment – the soil. In the research laboratory, there are many obstacles to developing solutions for Johne’s. On the farm, however, there appear to be just three: anxiety, prioritization and inaction.

For more than 200 years, vaccines have saved millions of lives and prevented human diseases like polio, measles, mumps and many others. Most people don’t realize that dairy cows are responsible for this life-saving invention. In 1796, Sir Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who developed cowpox lesions on their hands also were resistant to smallpox. To prove his theory, Jenner infected an orphan boy with the cowpox virus, and he too was fully protected from the deadly virus. This discovery led to the development of the smallpox vaccine.