HERD HEALTH

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.

When the dairy economy is suffering, it is only natural and financially responsible to cut costs wherever possible. However, it is important to not make knee-jerk reactions that could potentially reduce income. This would be counterproductive and only set in place a long line of problems and costs to follow.

Consistency is usually a positive term when describing footbath management. However, there are so many footbath management variables that one or more mistakes can easily be made. Without a simple, well-defined footbath protocol, the only consistent result will be poor footbath management and poor hoof health.