Pathogens that cause mastitis can be transferred via the environment or the milking process

Farmers are well aware of the challenges that come with various strains of salmonella, but handling an outbreak of sick animals can still be difficult. What can be done when Salmonella Dublin (S. Dublin)...

Subclinical mastitis, by definition, rarely gets noticed because it’s not visual. However, nearly 75 years ago, the California Mastitis Test (CMT) was introduced to help illuminate this mystery

The biggest loss from a case of mastitis is discarded milk

Mastitis, the inflammation of one or more mammary glands, is one of the most important diseases in dairy production

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