Mastitis Control
At Penbode Farm Vets, we can help you by advising on the most effective way to prevent mastitis and cell count problems in your herd using our unique and proven Mastitis Control Plan approach and by recommending the most effective changes and prescribing the most effective treatments.
See more about Mastitis Control and how it can help you here
A healthy udder is vital for healthy and productive cows.
Apart from costing money through lost milk, future performance, treatment and labour, high levels of mastitis result in poor animal welfare, and an overuse of antibiotics.
At your regular herd health visit we will monitor and make recommendations to keep somatic cell count (SCC), bactoscan and clinical mastitis on track.
When problems arise we will take a thorough look at all aspects of farm management that can impact upon udder health.
We follow the approach of the AHDB Dairy Mastitis Control Plan https://ahdb.org.uk/mastitis-control-plan
This will involve:
• Assessing your farm’s mastitis and SCC records
• Sampling affected cows to identify the cause
• Identifying where your mastitis is coming from
• Assessing the cow environment and management
• Observing milking routine and cow behaviour
• Checking the parlour is functioning and being used correctly
• Teat scoring the cows
• Assessing mastitis treatment protocols
All of the information above will enable an action plan specific to your herd to be put in place to correct the problems.
Selective Dry Cow Therapy
This is an important aspect of reducing clinical mastitis rates, and reducing unnecessary antibiotic use.
A low SCC cow given antibiotic dry cow therapy is 12 times MORE likely to suffer E coli mastitis in the following lactation. Uninfected cows do not need antibiotics.
We will discuss criteria for drying off your cows with teat sealant either with or without antibiotics. We can supply a dry off kit to help ensure that drying off cows is carried out correctly.
If you milk record, we can assess your records and provide lists of cows for each category of dry cow therapy.
If you do not milk record, we will recommend the use of our Vetscan DC-Q machine. A pre-dry-off milk sample is tested for levels of white blood cells which indicate whether an infection is present in the udder. The results can be used to implement SDCT with the confidence that you are administering the correct therapy to the correct cows.