When it comes to milk quality, there are details I can see now that I couldn’t before we had our voluntary milking system

Summer’s heat and humidity bring challenges of heat stress, bacteria, and flies to our animals

You may recall middle or high school teachers using Venn diagrams to illustrate correlations between two different subjects

With the heat comes the flies, and our farm uses several methods to keep these pests off our cows

Recently, I attended a herd health talk in which the presenter described a disease as the “silent thief,” and it struck me that, in my experience, Prototheca mastitis could be viewed analogously

“We always say prevention is key to milk quality,” said Penn State Extension educator Greg Strait. “We try to help cure the problem . . . but we want to prevent that problem when we arrive...

“Milking is a complex interaction where the dairyman, the cows, and the milking unit need to work as one,” said Greg Strait, an extension educator in Pennsylvania’s Fulton County

“We have to ask for practical use, is it helpful? Does the farmer know more after consulting the system than he or she did before? Of course, we want perfect sensor systems, but we have to use the...

It’s no secret that milk quality has improved enormously over the last few decades. In fact, DHI records indicate that the national average for somatic cell counts has fallen from 304,000 cells/mL...

We’ve never been the herd with the lowest somatic cell count (SCC). Our numbers have always bounced around, and we’ve literally tried everything to stabilize them

For years, it has been a very common practice for farms to treat all cows with antibiotics at the first sign of mastitis

U.S. dairies have made huge progress in improving milk quality — average somatic cell count (SCC) by DHIA herds in 2017 was 197,000, according to the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding

There was a time when mastitis ravaged dairy herds across the globe

In the past several years, selective dry cow treatment has gained some prevalence in the industry as an alternative to the more common blanket dry cow treatment, which has been the gold standard for mastitis...

When dairy producers think about mastitis, they likely don’t automatically connect it to reproductive problems, but the two can go hand in hand

When we are working with cows every day, we often don’t realize just how fast the dairy industry is changing

“If a farmer has an attitude of being responsible for mastitis on the farm, there was a lower bulk tank somatic cell count (SCC),” explained the University of Tennessee’s Peter Krawczel

Over the course of the last few decades, dairies have waged war on mastitis pathogens and by some gauges have been hugely successful. Particularly when bulk tank somatic cell counts are evaluated

Combining technologies can boost the overall success of monitoring mastitis events, shared the University of Kentucky’s Jeff Bewley at the recent Precision Dairy Conference in Lexington, Ky

Mastitis is an infection of the udder that, unfortunately, leaves few farms behind. Looking at the recently released USDA’s “Dairy 2014: Milk Quality, Milking Procedures and Mastitis on U.S....