follow-up to Alternative Milking Schedule (Cattle - Dairy)

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Thanks so much for the response! I am so glad to have found this forum. I do have a follow-up question though. I've heard from alot of people that "not milking enough" can cause mastitis--is this true? would we run a higher risk of mastitis by leaving the calf with the cow and milking once per day? or is it more associated with irregular schedules? again, think for the thoughtful comments and for sharing your stories jane

-- jane (janebug@hotmail.com), January 31, 2002

Answers

IANAE (I am not an expert).

However: you always run the risk of mastitis anyway. You notice it when the infection (there are likely always bacteria there) gets firmly established in one place. You're NOT milking the cow once a day; instead the cow is being milked steadily all the time (except overnight) by either the calf or you. This is ideally going to keep the milk moving along, and hence should minimise (but can't eliminate) the chance of bacteria sitting long enough in one place to establish mastitis.

One thing you should do: while cleaning up the udder (warm water, cloth, disinfectant) prior to milking, you also give it a good massage. This does several things. It, of course, cleans up the udder and gets rid of stray hairs and flakes of manure or calf spittle or dried urine or general dust and dirt which would otherwise fall into the milking bucket. It stimulates milk letdown. It also lets you establish if there are quarters the calf isn't favouring, and hence which you should milk preferentially to balance things off and keep milk flowing. And it lets you assess the condition of the quarters and identify matters if mastitis has got established in any quarter. You also do a trial milking of each quarter in turn (just a few squirts into another [dark-coloured] container) and examine it to ensure there's no mastitis or stringy bits in the milk before you settle down to the full milking. If you've got cats hanging around then this is what they get. That way you can start treatment early if necessary: generally topical application of an antibiotic (milk quarter out thoroughly, milk to be used only for cooking then animal food, or even cooking then compost), then what I was used to was a squeeze tube of antibiotic ointment inserted into the teat and then squeezed. Because the quarter had been thoroughly emptied, the ointment could find its way back to the seat of infection. While I guess you should do some more research with your extension agents on this, on the few occasions it happened for us, we continued to use the milk from the other uninfected quarters. This was a CONSIDERABLE time ago, though, and I'd check again. However, if two quarters became infected Dad would treat the infection aggressively and then dry the cow off, and if it happened in two lactations he'd mark her as one he wouldn't use for milking again; and think about selling her off - after all she probably couldn't do a good job of raising a calf either.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), February 06, 2002.


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