I wanted to continue my discussion on the cost of Mastitis by talking about some of the variables that help to catch mastitis earlier. Here are a few questions I want to try and answer:
- Where are the cases of mastitis coming from in my herd? Are they coming from certain pens?
- Are the milkers catching mastitis before the test?
- Are there seasonal effects to the cases of mastitis?
It might help to understand what I’ve talked about previously, so if you haven’t been following, you can view the other articles the mastitis tag page.
To start out, it helps to understand the data you have available. And of course, the more data you record, the better picture you will have. In the video below I look at a report that includes the data for:
- SCC counts greater than 1 million
- Mastitis reported by the milkers
- Cows sorted by the month they calved and by the number of days in milk
With this information together, you can begin to understand how often your milkers are diagnosing mastitis or if there is an opportunity to catch mastitis earlier. You can also see the difference between the fresh cows and the cows that have been longer in milk. There is also an easy way to see the seasonal effects on mastitis.
By drilling into the data and looking at the drug tracking tools, you can get more detail about the reported cases of mastitis by month to understand the seasonal effects. There is also way to sort it by pen.
If you can identify more cases coming from a specific pen, then you can go visually evaluate the difference between that pen and the others. This will help you understand what may be contributing to the more frequent cases of mastitis.
Watch the video below and contact me if you have any comments or if you see something we can discuss further:
This post is part 3 of a 3-part series on analyzing the effects of mastitis. To be notified immediately when the other articles are published, subscribe and choose immediate notifications.