Counting the cost of dry cow management

It had been a busy Thursday, when I arrived back to find one client remaining at the surgery. He had a serious cell count problem that had built up over the summer. In early April, the bulk tank read 125,000. This had risen to 516,000 by mid-June and then 886,000 by the end of June. In our practice, we have had a few similar cases over the last two years. We can’t explain why this is, maybe it is a problem that has been building over time, but our approach is always the same. We go through the milking process with the farmer, ensuring that pre-dipping and post-dipping is carried out. We make sure the farmer is wearing gloves to reduce contamination of the teats and udder. We ask about the maintenance and service of the milking machine and liners. Often the farmer has checked this before he comes to us and this was the case here. Our investigation then proceeds to:

If the high cell count cow is in her fourth lactation plus, we advise to cull her.

If a good young cow has one bad quarter we may try to dry off this cow.

In this case, we took milk samples from five problem cows and sent them to the laboratory. Bacteria were cultured and antibiotic sensitivity tests were done. This helped us to pick the most suitable dry cow tube. The right dry cow tube is the best (and often the only) treatment to reduce cell count. In our herd, the two significant bugs that grew were Staph Aureus and E coli.

Our farmer was hoping for a quicker solution and he tried injecting some cows for five days with antibiotics.

Two cows dropped from 2,000,000 and 3,000,000 to 39,000 and 201,000 respectively. One cow stayed the same, around 3,000,000, and another one got worse going from 2.6 to 8,000,000. As you can see, antibiotic injections during lactation have a variable response. They will work better at drying off. We ended up drying off 25% of this herd, half of which were earmarked for culling and got no dry cow tube. All of these developed mastitis after drying off. The other half were treated with the dry cow tube that we picked following the sensitivity tests.

Next spring will tell how successful our control programme has been. This farmer had planned to expand his herd next year, but the mastitis problem has forced him to put that on hold, as he is going to find it difficult to even replace the cows lost this year. He also has a sizeable medicine bill to take care of, making a cell count problem a costly experience.

*Shane McGuckin is a partner in The Vet Hospital, a five person mixed practice in Gorey. The Vet Hospital, Gorey, is part of XLVets. XLVets is a group of progressive practices that work together to achieve a better future for agriculture and veterinary in Ireland. For further information go to www.xlvets.ie