It's time to dry off your spring-calving cows and the decisions you make now will have long-term impacts on your herd.
Diagnostics are essential for decision making
The more information you have at hand, the easier your decision making will be. The best outcomes come from individualised decision making and information collection.
The optimal dry off date for each cow is influenced by her condition, expected calving date, current production level, and the available feed. This will be different for every cow in the herd and calculating that date will allow for better decision-making before and during the dry period.
Farm Source Veterinary Programme Manager Mike Shallcrass says management software such as LIC’s MINDA® and CRV’s myHERD are invaluable tools to aid decision making, provided farmers input data such as body condition scores, pregnancy test result and bacteriology.
"Once it's all in one place, it's actually quite easy to analyse. You can run a finger down and decide on the individual approach: this cow gets treated, this one culled, this cow should be dried off early, this one later etc. There are calculators in the software to help determine when and how to treat them," Michael says.
"For a spring calving herd, if you dry off or cull your lower producing animals now, it allows you to feed your higher producing cows more and they can milk on longer. But in order to do that, you need to have collated all that information: body condition score, recent test results. Collect as much information you can as early as you can. If you can bring it to your Milk Quality consultation your vet will be in a stronger position to determine the best course for your farm. There are decisions that you make now that will set your cows up really well for next season, if you get them right."
Pay attention to hygiene
Reducing infections brought on to the farm is essential for drying off best practice, but it’s also important every time an animal is given an intra-mammary treatment. Staff should wear gloves in the shed, not milk when sick, and ensure equipment is clean and sterile. The most common risks for mastitis post dry-off come from two sources:
- bugs introduced while drying off due to poor hygiene
- environmental infections that flare up a few weeks later in cows still dripping milk.
It takes about two weeks for milk production to cease once milking stops, and it’s important udders are kept clean over this time and cows are only fed maintenance to ensure production stops. Cows dripping milk have open teat canals and are at heightened risk of environmental mastitis, even if they’ve been treated with antibiotics while drying off.
It is essential farm staff are trained on monitoring mastitis post dry-off. For cows that are not infected you can use an internal teat sealant to create a barrier that is only removed when the quarter is stripped out. Antibiotics can be used for infected cows but farmers are best not to pre-emptively treat cows with antibiotics.
"If we overuse antibiotics now there is a real risk on farm that we will end up with cases of mastitis that are incurable, because we’ve only got a couple of different antibiotic families that we can use in cattle. It has already happened on a small number of farms. With no treatment options available the cows have to be culled."
Book a Milk Quality Improvement Visit
Farm Source offers free, independent milk quality improvement visits to help reduce the farmers with somatic cell counts and make the best decisions during drying off. Farms visited by the team last season had, on average, a 7% lower cell count the following season.
For more information and advice on your milk quality, talk to your local Farm Source Team or book a Milk Quality Service Visit today.