In my younger days, the adage was, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” If you Google it, you can find all sorts of medical facts to support that wisdom. The routine for keeping me healthy became more complicated when I turned 50 – and it continues to get more complicated as I get further and further from 50. I have gone from an apple a day to an apple and a handful of medications every day, a workout when my schedule allows and an annual checkup – maybe that is too much information.
Similarly, routines to maintain udder health change with the transition to automated milking. In a parlor, most of the monitoring of the cow, the equipment, and to some extent the environment, is part of the milking routine. It is completed by the workers in the parlor as they prep, strip and attach milkers. In automated milking, it is important to develop daily routines to monitor those milk quality control points in other ways.
Monitoring the cows
Automated milking systems provide a wide range of information about cow health. Most systems monitor milk conductivity and color. Some systems also give an indication of somatic cell count. Changes in milk yield and milking frequency are also indicators of udder health. Automated milking software has tools to combine all of these metrics into indexes so managers can quickly find the cows at greatest risk for mastitis. These indexes in the automated milking systems can be more sensitive than visual observation in the parlor.
Your daily routine should include a protocol for checking the information the system generates and evaluating cows that are flagged. Cows can then be retained in the robot, or sorted after the robot, for a physical exam. Unfortunately, the list generated by the automated milking software will include cows that don’t really have mastitis. Use visual observation, temperature and cowside tests like the California Mastitis Test (CMT) to identify the true clinical cows. Your fetch list is an important health monitoring tool too. When a cow you haven’t fetched in a month shows up on your fetch list, you need to know why. There is a good chance she is telling you she is not feeling well.
The system may identify cows with mastitis before they are clinical. You don’t need to treat every cow that the system flags. You do need to establish a threshold and examine every cow that exceeds that threshold. Continue to monitor asymptomatic cows because they are at higher risk of becoming symptomatic. Avoid the situation where a cow shows up on an attention list, the herd manager evaluates the cow and dismisses the list as inaccurate, and the cow is found clinically ill a day later.
Keep in mind that milk processors measure mastitis in terms of somatic cell count. Your premiums and your access to the milk market are based on somatic cell count. If you have a somatic cell count problem, you will need to measure the somatic cell count to fix it. Conductivity and somatic cell count are not always correlated. An active infection may involve significantly elevated conductivity with only a moderate increase in cell count. A past infection might no longer involve enough inflammation to increase conductivity while the somatic cell count is still high. Use conductivity, yield, somatic cell count and milking interval to find new infections. Measure individual cow cell count to determine which cows are contributing the most to the bulk tank somatic cell count.
Monitoring the equipment
Incomplete or failed milkings are the most important metrics to measure automated milking performance. Both mean that a cow has given less than the expected amount of milk from one or more quarters. Cow factors such as udder conformation, bad behavior or actual reduced production can result in incomplete/failed milkings. But if incompletes spike up on one robot, poor attachment could be the problem and that robot needs to be checked for worn, dirty or incorrectly adjusted components. Current production models of robots should have less than 5% incomplete milkings.
Your daily routine should include monitoring reports that show incomplete/failed milkings. Use a report that shows the percent of incomplete milkings for each robot in the last 24 hours. Compare the 24-hour value to a longer time period to see if there is a trend for a specific robot. Fresh 2-year-olds are less cooperative than mature cows, so if one robot milks all fresh 2-year-olds, it is likely to have more incompletes than the other robots. The program may have reports to save time troubleshooting by narrowing a robot problem down to a specific quarter.
Watch each robot milk at least one cow every day. Listen for unusual sounds. Make sure teat spray completely covers the teats. Observe the amount of water used in the teat cleaning process. Mark all chemical containers at regular intervals to make sure dip and cleaning chemicals are dispensed consistently. While you are at it, listen for feed being dispensed in the robot. Feed does not directly affect milk quality, but it is important for maintaining regular milking intervals.
Monitoring the environment
The environment has to be maintained to keep the cow clean. Well-trained milking staff in a parlor will prep teats until they are clean. A well-maintained robot preps teats for a preset length of time – whether the teats become clean or not. As a rule of thumb, the robot prep process will improve the 4-point teat hygiene score by 1 to 2 points. A cow that comes to the robot with a hygiene score of 4, with teats crusted with dry manure, is likely to be milked with a hygiene score of 2 or 3, even when the prep system is working correctly. A clean environment minimizes the number of cows that start with a hygiene score of 4.
Your daily routine needs to include regular hand scraping of areas the mechanical scrapers don’t reach. Maintain stall bedding so that cows can use the whole freestall. As the amount of bedding in deep-bedded stalls drops below the curb, the useful portion of the stall becomes shorter, the cow positions herself farther forward, and she is more likely to leave manure in the stall. Create a protocol to make sure udders are singed regularly. Udders will stay cleaner and robots will attach cups more efficiently. Udders will need to be singed more frequently in cold climates.
Establish a daily routine to monitor cows, equipment and environment to help you detect small problems and manage them before they become large problems. An apple a day can keep mastitis away.
