As the pressure to use fewer antibiotics continues to grow, animal agriculture needs to be inventive and find different solutions to treat animals or keep livestock healthy from the start.

Mild or moderate clinical mastitis is defined as infection or inflammation of the mammary gland that results in abnormalities in milk consistency or color and/or swelling or redness of the affected gland. These cases differ from severe mastitis, which manifests as a systemically sick cow.

Researchers at Cornell have identified another dietary tool that nutritionists and dairy producers can use to prevent hypocalcemia.

Many dairy producers point to freezing winter weather as a reason to reduce or eliminate footbath use. Before accepting this as fact, let’s review winter footbath research to see “if” there is a benefit “and” recommended winter footbath practices, and then determine “but” what is the most economical and effective winter hoof treatment.

Editor’s note: This is the first of two articles about managing the maternity area and newborn calves using a team approach. Click here to read the second article "Praiseworthy newborn calf specialists check these boxes". Maternity is a classically overlooked and poorly understood area of the farm.

As we move forward as a society, the dairy industry will continue to have to justify the use of antibiotics on their operations.

Recent research from the University of California – Davis offers further indication oral calcium supplementation may support increased milk production in addition to supplying the extra calcium needed to ward off subclinical hypocalcemia.

When close-up cows are fed a negative dietary cation-anion difference (DCAD) diet, it induces a metabolic acidosis, which acidifies the urine.

Cow health, nutrition and reproduction are key when trying to find the best options for the transition period of dairy cows. That said, there is a lot of information about nutritional strategies that can be tough to sort through.

The C.O.W.S. program has been successful in working with dairy producers and their teams to unlock bottlenecks in their operations.