It's time for milk quality consults

It’s coming into autumn, so for our spring calving herds that means it’s time to review the season and plan for the upcoming one. Our milk quality consults are a valuable tool to assess which areas have gone well, and where improvements can be made. For this consult, there is a special focus on mastitis, cow health, and somatic cell counts over the previous months. As we all know, happy, healthy cows produce more milk of better quality- good for them and for us.

Mastitis is one of the biggest costs we face, in terms of cow welfare, lost milk, and overall farm productivity. To do this consult the most vital thing we require are records from the farm. Some of these are provided by you, the farmers, and some we see from our analysis programs such as Infovet and MINDA. Giving us these records such as numbers of cases, products used, repeat cases and cows culled due to mastitis can give valuable information as to the source of any problems on farm. Then together, we can decide which treatments to use next season, how to tackle any issues, and the best choice for drying off cows at the end of this season.

With antibiotic resistance becoming an ever-increasing problem worldwide, we need to ensure we are doing the best we can to protect against this as well as protect the welfare of our cows. We must make decisions based on data such as herd testing so that we can justify where and when antibiotics should be used and that our cows are getting what they need to stay healthy.

Book in with your farm’s vet for a milk quality consult and get yourself ready for next season.

Dr Gemma Withers BVSc Farm Vet, Kopu