by Amanda Smith, Associate Editor It makes sense that herds with a standardized milking routine would have much lower rates of clinical mastitis. Yet, many parlors lack the consistency cows crave. "The people we depend on in the parlor are often poorly trained," noted Pam Ruegg at the Wisconsin Dairy Field Representatives Conference. According to research from the University of Wisconsin, only 22 percent of milkers receive frequent training and feedback.
Automatic teat scrubbers are often introduced to remove human variability from the milking process. "The principle is adopted from robotic milking. The brushes scrub the teats, a sanitizing solution is applied and then the brushes rotate to remove excess moisture," noted Ruegg, with the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"As its popularity has grown, we received a lot of questions but had no data to help answer them," she added. To alleviate some of these knowledge gaps, Ruegg's group studied whether or not the scrubbers effectively sanitize the teat skin.
Ten Wisconsin farms, that had been using teat scrubbers for one to seven years, were enrolled in the study. Bacterial counts before and after preparation using either the scrubber or a conventional prep method were compared.
Researchers also titrated the amount of disinfectant in the teat scrubber system to determine the parts per million of chlorine dioxide present.
While the bacterial count reduction using a teat scrubber varied among farms, maintaining an effective concentration of disinfectant appears to be critical to the successful use of teat scrubbers.
"The concentration of chlorine dioxide was associated with a greater reduction for all bacterial counts. Farms need a minimum of 500 ppm of disinfectant for effective bacterial reduction," concluded Ruegg.
February 16, 2015
