HERD HEALTH

Dairy farming has become an increasingly complex activity today, mostly due to its multidisciplinary demands. It is essential for dairy producers and their advisers to take a broad 360-degree view of the business.

If your farm could have great success and prevent more lameness by spending less money, would you be interested?

The importance of transition cow management is well-known. But until recently, there have been unknowns about early disease indicators which impact the health of transition cows and heifers.

The benefits of a healthy transition period are more than simply the convenience of not having to deal with cases of ketosis or twisted stomachs. Treating cows right for those critical weeks before and after calving leads to more milk, better reproduction and fewer headaches throughout the lactation.

Several factors can affect teat skin condition. These include weather, housing conditions, teat disinfectant chemistry, milking system settings and micro-organisms.

Canada’s dairy industry has made great progress in access and usage of data available on-farm in the past years. Information on milk, specifically data on milk component and urea analysis at each delivery, can improve our knowledge of the feed efficiency of our herds and dramatically speed up the response time to a change.