Minnesota DHIA News

Improving Milk Quality – a success story

When Paul and Mary Zimmerman moved their dairy herd from Indiana to Brooten, Minnesota 2 years ago a combination of moving stress, hot weather, and malfunctioning equipment drove their average SCC count to over 700,000. But within a year they reduced the average count to less than 100,000 and for most of the past 12 months have been in the 60-80,000 range. "Keeping cows clean, dry, and comfortable is a high priority on our dairy," says Paul. Fresh wood shavings with hydrated lime ad ded are put in the rubber mattress freestalls every other day. Manure and soiled bedding is scraped out of stalls at least 3x per day.

Cows are pre-dipped with an iodine predip and wiped with individual towels, with close attention being paid to complete coverage and getting teat ends clean. Their new pulsators display milk weights and give an audible alarm when the cow is finished mi lking, so that helps the Zimmermans to consistently remove units as soon as cows are done milking. A Barrier post-teat dip is used; again making sure there is complete teat coverage.

All fresh cows are checked with CMT—Paul says he can often identify infected quarters on the first milking, and for sure by the third milking. Treating quarters that are infected at freshening has been a real aid in helping cows get off to a good start and in keeping total counts down. DHIA testing helps in identifying infected cows and monitoring different aspects of their milk quality program, as well as providing other important management information.

Paying attention to those details does take extra time. But fewer health problems and a higher pay price with quality premium gives the Zimmermans a very good return for the effort. Paul believes that keeping cows clean and comfortable not only helps w ith producing high quality milk, but also helps reduce other health problems and improve production and reproduction performance. "It all adds up to making dairying more enjoyable."

Paul's final words on milk Quality? "Dairymen should always keep in mind that the product we produce ends up on peoples' tables. We need to do all we can to make sure that product is clean and of high quality when it leaves our farms."

Quality Leaders for April 2003 Sample Days

Ask the Experts SCC questions

Dr. Jeff Reneau, University of Minnesota

Want to Track Health Events? (Or does your Vet need this?)

One of the changes we recently made in our data collection software will enable us to ask practical questions about management practices, and then quickly summarize the data and report the results to you here. We will not l ook at individual herd data, and that data will disappear with each new sample date. Our first survey questions starting on this test were related to udder care. We are asking on a herd by herd basis whether udder hair is singed, clipped, or left alone. The second question involves frequency. If hair is clipped or singed, is that done monthly, yearly or somewhere in between (quarterly)? After a month we will summarize this data by SCC and production, and report it back to you. This may not be scient ific research, but is a pretty practical way to gather and look at the data. Customers who do not wish to have their data included may decline. Information is confidential and is not looked at on an individual herd basis. If you have a survey question you’d like to see included, please pass it on to your Field Representative.