Milking Routine

There has been a lot of talk lately about milking routine and what is the best system to encourage milk let down and get the cows to milk out as quickly as possible. Cows are creatures of habit and it is important that everybody who milks your cows follows the same routine. It has been found that from the cow’s point of view it is better to prepare the cows in batches of six or eight. When the teats are first stimulated there should be a delay of between one and two minutes before the teat cups are put on. Outside of this window there will be poor milk let down and a longer milking period.

Teat Stripping

The best thing that you can do to stimulate milk let down is to strip each teat two or three times. This is also the best thing that you can do to detect the first signs of mastitis. Move along the line of six or eight cows stripping and pre-dipping if this is part of your routine. The final stage is to go back to the first cow, wipe with a paper towel and attach the unit. I realize that this is not done on many farms as it is though to take too long, in fact it has been shown that it speeds up the milking because the cows milk out faster. On some farms using this routine it has been found that not only has the milking time been reduced, but there has been an increase in milk yield as the cows milk out better.

Milk Flow

Watch the milk flow through the cluster when the unit is first attached. For the first 30 seconds or so there is a high flow rate as the milk in the teat cistern is removed. If there has not been adequate teat stimulation the flow will then virtually cease until the action of the teat cups starts the let down reflex. It is not a good thing to have the clusters attached when no milk is flowing. There are two kinds of milk let down reflex conditioned and unconditioned. Conditioned occurs when the cow sees the sights and sounds of the parlour, if you shout at them to get them to come in or go out this will also be seen as part of the conditioned milk let down reflex. The unconditioned part of the let down reflex occurs when the teats are first stimulated. The aim of a good milking routine is to get as much oxytocin released as possible to maximize milk flow rates.

Segregating Cows

In larger herds another way that the milking time can be reduced is not to milk any cows with problems when they first come through the parlour. You can deal with them better if you get them through as a group at the end. When they are in the parlour they are holding up all of the other cows on that side so it is better to let them stand while the rest are milked and get them through again at the end. There should be more time then for treatments and less chance that you will contaminate the bulk tank with antibiotics. If you have the space it might be possible to house the treatments cows separately and reduce the risk of infection spreading in the cubicles or loose housing.

Whole Season Worming

Fort Dodge have reformulated Cydectin injection so that is has a long acting effect on cattle after just one injection. The new development is a 10% concentration of the wormer which you inject into the base of the ear when young stock are turned out in the spring. They have found that this one injection works against gut worms for up to one hundred and fifty days. They do recommend that the calves stay on the same pasture for the whole of that period for the best results. I am not sure if this one injection would take you through the whole of the grazing season. For dairy calves there would be little chance that they would develop any immunity to lungworm so they would need either Huskvac well before they first grazed or to go into a herd that was regularly using Erpinex on the milking cows to stop the build up of lungworm larvae on the pastures.

Lame Cows

Dermatitis can flare up at this time of the year. Cows must have some sort of immune response to this infection as it tends to be the younger cows or animals who have recently been introduced to the herd that show the most dramatic symptoms. It is difficult to avoid dermatitis all together but it does seem to have a tendency to spread less if we have colder winters. The infection spreads in stagnant slurry so try to organize things so that the cows do not come into contact with slurry that has been on the yard for more that twenty four hours. Often there are one or two places where it accumulates and if you can limit these or eliminate them all together it will spread only slowly in the herd and you might not need to send them all through an antibiotic foot bath. Dermatitis can also be a problem when cows are loose housed, especially around water troughs and areas where the roof or guttering is letting in water. If you have to use buildings like that sometimes for cattle try to keep the younger ones out to them as they will be the ones who will not have any resistance to dermatitis.

Sheep Scab

I have never quite understood why it should be but the colder it gets the more active will be the mites that cause sheep scab. Sheep seem to be able to tolerate a low level of infection and seldom itch and rub during the summer. It is easy to buy in ewes and rams carrying sheep scab and showing no symptoms. Unless you quarantine and dip all incomers it might not be until now that they start to show the first signs of scab. Any rubbing should be investigated as it is better to treat in now at an early stage than to let it go on until lambing time when it will be more difficult to control. Injections help to prevent sheep scab, but they will not eliminate it completely as it is too easy to under dose one or two individuals and the mites will survive in low numbers to start off the infection again next year. Dipping is better if you can organize it, but it is not wise to dip sheep when they are heavily pregnant or have young lambs at foot so it is better to tackle the problem now while you have a better chance of curing the infection.

Wobbly Lambs

Swayback is not as common as it was once, but it does occur from time to time mainly on hill farms. If there is insufficient copper in the blood stream of the ewe the developing foetus will not form a proper spinal canal. The resulting lambs will show a weakness of varying degrees in their back. Some animals are unable to stand; the more common ones that we see tend to loose control of their back end when they are two to three weeks of age. There is no effective treatment for lambs with swayback. With careful management you will be able to get them to fatten, but they will always be affected by the disease. If you think this might have happened to some of your lambs last year, the time to investigate it in the first half of the ewes pregnancy so that they can be treated if necessary before the spinal canal of the lambs develops.

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