HERD HEALTH

As the pressure to use fewer antibiotics continues to grow, animal agriculture needs to be inventive and find different solutions to treat animals or keep livestock healthy from the start.

Skin can chap due to frequent washing, repeated wetting or exposure to cold, dry or windy weather. Teats are subjected to these processes during every milking. Teat dips with effective emollient packages can rejuvenate dry teats.

It’s easy to focus on heat stress and its impact on herd health during the dog days of summer, but one often-overlooked area is cold stress and how it compromises herd productivity and performance.

Extra days open, premature culling, lost milk production and even death are some of the costly consequences of lameness on a dairy, but there are ways producers can cut down on losses.

Do you know what causes about 50 percent of lameness cases in dairy cattle? Digital dermatitis. This disease is tricky to manage and can cause serious economic losses if not controlled. 

No one likes to see a lame cow – not the farmer, vet, employee, hoof trimmer, consumer and especially not the cow itself. Lameness, cow comfort and animal welfare have come to the forefront of many headlines in the past few years.