Improving Milk Quality: A Review

Dr. Andy Lefeld
Dr. Ruegg was a recent speaker at our producers banquet in December. I thought I would review some of the main points of her talk regarding milk quality.

Mastitis is a major disease that is still has a major cost and impact on our milking herds. As an industry average, we have 15-35% of cows affected with subclinical mastitis every day, and 20-40% of our cows have clinical mastitis each lactation, making it the most common and costly diseases of dairy cows. Many direct and indirect costs are associated with this disease.

In order to maintain a market for our milk, we must try to produce market-ready milk. Some of the components of market ready milk include: Consistently low SCC (<150K), Low bacteria Counts, and Low risk farm practices. Of factors contributing to your bulk tank SCC, the number of subclinically infected cows is one of the biggest contributors to bulk tank SCC, more so than the number of clinical mastitis cases that a farm may have. Managing subclinically infected cows through individual cow SCC testing can help keep a handle on the number of subclinically infected cows a farm may have. The more cows with mastitis, clinical or subclinical, generally, the more antibiotic usage. This also makes a higher risk for antibiotic residues in milk. To reduce our antibiotic usage, we can also take a milk culture based approach and used this to direct whether a cow should be treated with antibiotics or not.

Dr. Ruegg also pointed out that we should stop trying to treat chronically infected cows. These cows have many costs associated with them, including potentially infecting other cows. We should be culling these cows. They take a lot of management energy, and the payoff of a reduced SCC is generally really rare.

We should also be looking for ways to invest in mastitis control. Investments are something that will give us a return later. Some of the investments in udder health include teat dip, clean towels in your parlor, clean dry bedding in stalls, stalls, milking milking machine maintenance, vaccines, dry cow treatment, etc. You may have realized how much benefit some of these practices are recently with the weather event that affected us around Christmas. You may have elected to not use teat dips, or been unable to manage your bedding the way you normally want to, and your bulk tank SCC may have had a little spike around this time too, giving you firsthand knowledge of its importance.

If you want to improve your farm's milk quality for 2023, please don't hesitate to ask us how we can help!

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