The author is the quality control veterinarian with Select Milk Producers.
Milking fresh heifers for the first time can be a stressful and hazardous experience for both milking technicians and cattle alike. As an industry, we have just largely accepted that to be a fact. But what if I told you there is a potential alternate universe where milking fresh heifers could be less taxing?
Here are some tangible ways we can work to improve the initial milking experience.
Set up for success
The heifer we are about to milk has recently gone through one of the most stressful and painful processes life has to offer. She certainly will be sore and still getting used to walking with an udder, let alone dealing with the udder swelling and discomfort itself. We bring this animal into a completely new environment — an area that is often dark with loud sounds she has never heard before (like fans, pulsators, and stall exit cylinders) and slippery footing often with changing slopes — and ask her to willingly navigate these obstacles in a timely manner. We touch the udder that has never been touched before, attach a large “suction cup” to the swollen teats, and expect biology to provide us with a positive outcome! How might we look to improve this daunting experience?
One option is to pretrain springing heifers to the parlor ahead of calving. There are multiple approaches to pretraining, and all can work. On some farms, two to three days a week, springers are brought into the holding area, enter the parlor through the cow entrance, and are loaded into stalls. They have teat dip applied and their udder touched, but they are not forestripped or milked.
Even if a parlor does not have downtime, there are still opportunities. Larger dairies may have a separate hospital parlor where training can occur. Another option is to do a more limited training experience during the parlor clean in place wash. Heifers could also enter the parlor through the parlor entrance, but if the exit gates are left open, heifers can mingle around the cow deck. To associate the milking center with a more positive experience, many dairies will offer some feed on the cow deck or use it to entice animals to load into the stalls.
Another helpful approach is to consider grouping fresh heifers and fresh cows together. While separating fresh heifers and fresh cows has advantages for feeding and diet formulation, comingling them has advantages for the milking experience. Heifers can observe the behaviors of older cows loading into the parlor and use the herd instinct to follow them. Older cows can be a calming force for heifers with this strategy. It also allows some relief for milking technicians because fewer cows in a zone will need special attention during the milking. Older cows also help apply pressure to a heifer that is balking far more effectively and safely than any human can.
Immediately after calving, the heifer will have extremely high levels of oxytocin in the blood. This drives excellent milk letdown if colostrum can be harvested very close to calving, especially if the colostrum can be harvested with the calf present. Both of these factors greatly improve the first milking experience. Harvesting colostrum in the maternity barn can also improve blood flow to the udder, which can start to relieve the swelling and congestion leading to udder pressure, help reduce leaking milk postcalving, and improve the antibody concentration of colostrum itself. Perhaps most importantly, it separates the stressful new experience of milking and lactation from the other stressful new experience of entering the parlor environment.
In veterinary medicine, the saying goes, “A better life through chemistry!” New advances in pheromones, particularly bovine maternal appeasement substance, have shown some very positive results in modifying animal behavior responses to stressful situations and deserve consideration. There may be other advances on the way as well, so stay tuned.
While the saying is not “A better life through mechanical engineering,” anti-kick devices may have a place in protecting human safety, but that place should be in rare instances only and as a last resort when other strategies have proven unsuccessful first.
Help people help heifers
When the needs and instincts of cattle and stockmen come into conflict, animal care and outcomes suffer along with the attitude and morale of our team. The role of dairy leadership is to do what is within our power to see that our team and our cattle are placed into the best situations as often as possible, have all the resources they need to be successful, and empower them to make the decisions necessary as challenges occur.
Training is one of the best ways to shape a parlor culture, and many dairies do invest significantly in animal handling training. Most of that training focuses on what to do when the situation is normal or, alternately, what never to do. However, the best training discusses what to do when the situation gets challenging. This includes knowing it is okay to ask for help and who to contact when help is required. Milkers must know how to be emotionally aware and realize when the situation is escalating, plus what “outs” may exist to de-escalate both themselves and the animal(s).
It is helpful for milkers to know that if a heifer improperly loads into the parlor, it is okay to simply milk her where she is, if possible, rather than try to back the animal out or force her to move. It is also okay to not milk a heifer out completely in instances when we need to condition animals not to kick the unit off. Teach milkers that the detacher decides when milking is complete. Do not milk heifers on “manual mode,” as this is counter to providing the heifer a good initial milking experience and training her for good future milking habits.
If an animal is too “kicky,” you can try having someone distract it from the front, or perhaps putting hobbles on. If all else fails, milkers should know that it is also okay to not milk the heifer this shift rather than risk an injury to them or the animal. Simply note the heifer’s identification or mark it accordingly and alert management.
Ensure the animal handling principles your leadership team says they value are true to what the leadership demonstrates. While most dairies emphasize relaxed or low-energy stockmanship principles with employees, it is also true that many dairies employ people with a position title of “cow pusher,” creating some mental confusion for stockmen. Dairies also frequently emphasize never hitting cows but place objects like bars to “lock” sequencing gates or lengths of milk hose into technician’s hands that serve as temptations to act in ways we would all regret when frustration sets in.
Similarly, owners and managers do a disservice to the team if we do not remain vigilant for improper use of routine items such as cloth towels as handling “aids,” whether they contact animals or not, or correct slippery slope behaviors we see. If your team feels handling aids are a viable tool, it is our job to see that we pick aids that make proper behaviors easy and bad behaviors hard. Many dairies will utilize foam pool noodles as a handling aid for the fresh pen, which carry minimal risk of abuse. Outside of the fresh pen, handling aids do not have a place in the parlor and holding area. The bulk of our herd should be conditioned to the milking process and want to be milked. If that’s not true, it indicates other underlying issues.
Ask most milking technicians, and they will tell you that the quickest way to get management’s attention is to let the parlor fall behind schedule. Despite this, nothing harms animal care or safety outcomes more than the real or perceived need to do a job quickly. Understand that fresh animals will be harder to handle, often require additional or different procedures beyond normal milking protocols, and generally take more time to complete the milking steps. We can ease some of the stress of fresh heifer milking simply by giving our team ample time to do the job right based on the animal handling principles we desire.
It can also be helpful to add more labor to the parlor while milking fresh pens. To condition fresh heifers to proper milking etiquette more consistently and improve the milking experience for them, more people are needed for this pen. Where possible, I would prefer to add a manager who can not only be another set of hands but also a calming influence if the situation does get stressful and trusted to make decisions in challenging situations. An added benefit of this is that management gets a hands-on appreciation of the challenges the team faces.
It is also often beneficial to have the people responsible for monitoring and treating fresh cattle be a part of the fresh heifer milking experience. This gives them the chance to assess the udder fill and udder texture ahead of their normal checks plus observe the fresh animals from a different vantage point. They may catch actionable items that might be missed in a basic exam out in the pens.
Don’t forget about the evening and night shifts — good milking experiences during the day can quickly be undone by negative experiences at night. If we are not offering the same set of solutions and resources to all shifts, then we are not truly managing the risks of poor handling and poor animal outcomes.
Make your facilities work
Despite the parlor being the most frequent place of animal handling interaction on a dairy, I see many dairies where the milking facility itself is a stumbling block when it comes to milking fresh heifers.
Commit to parlor maintenance. Lack of needed maintenance of flooring/matting, cow entrance gates, the cow deck, and the milking stall itself are often significant detriments to voluntary cow flow, creating a situation where animals do not load into the stall, do not index correctly so that they can be milked easily, or “short-load,” creating empty stalls on a side or turn.
Design milking facilities with the cow in mind. For the better part of the last 40 years, the beef industry has been investing in research on how lighting, the use of shielding in key areas, and flooring and footing surfaces influence animal behaviors in handling systems. This has led to innovative facility designs that use natural cattle instincts to create positive voluntary cow flow. Contrast that with much of the North American dairy industry, where the design of most holding areas and parlor entrances have little science or cow sense behind them.
Many parlors have issues with slippery flooring, challenges with drainage, stark light-to-dark transitions, lack shielding in key areas, allow for distractions by people in the parlor or from other cattle, and require tight turns. All of these impede natural cow behaviors and voluntary cow flow. We can learn a lot from the people we are selling those dairy-beef calves to about how to design a handling facility!
The addition of a swing gate to the entrance or where the holding area necks down into the entrance can be a great enhancement. This allows for the milking technician to shrink the size of the holding area laterally beyond the length defined by the farthest advance of the crowd gate. The technician can apply pressure to the cattle while they work the cattle from the side where the animals can see them, walking against the direction of desired cow traffic to create forward motion. In a conventional two-sided parlor, this gate is mounted on a post in the middle of the man entrance to the holding area and is long enough so that when the crowd gate is fully advanced, a person can still pass behind the swing gate when it is pointed straight away from the parlor and can swing to either side. In a rotary parlor, I try to mount the gate off of one of the posts that forms the transition from the angled portion of the holding area to the cow entrance.
In this dairy economy, both cattle and personnel are nearly irreplaceable resources. Dairies that place value on improving the dynamics of how fresh heifers are brought into the milking string have a competitive advantage in production, milk quality, and return on labor investment. To achieve that takes believing a better outcome is possible and being willing to look for ways to make that belief a reality.
