Why Record Health Data?

Manage Treatments for the Well-being and Health of the Animal
Keeping track of treatments and health events does not mean you will have fewer problems, but will help when corrections need to be made. With good health records and consistent analysis protocols, event trends can be identified faster and therefore corrections can be made sooner. This will help to minimize loss of production and cull rates.

Record Health Data for Genetic Evaluations - Improve the Future of Your Herd
Whether or not you are doing genetic evaluations, the collecting that information on your computer and sharing it to a national database will help to improve the data you have available to your business. To do that, you just have to authorize your data to flow between your software and national organizations.

Next the information you record needs to be in a standardized format so that information can easily be transmitted. The advantage of standardizing the information is that it is easier to analyze on a whole herd basis. 

Protect Your Business and Meet FDA Requirements
When drug residue enters the food supply the most common reason the FDA cites following an investigation is failure to maintain complete treatment records. If an investigator were to visit your farm, having good health records will help protect your dairy by showing diligence in maintaining health records.

Complete treatment records include the following:

• Animal ID
• Disease Treated
• Drug Given
• Milk and Meat Withholding Times
• Dosage of Drug Given
• Treatment Date
• Individual who gave the Drug

Future Proof Your Records

In 2018, the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding (CDCB) began releasing health traits as part of the official release of genetic and genomic evaluations. Net Merit $ and the other lifetime profit indices have been revised to factor in disease resistance and to update the economic values used in calculations. The CDCB selected six of the most common, costly health events impacting dairy cattle. The health traits are:

• Hypocalcemia (Milk Fever)
• Displaced Abomasum
• Ketosis
• Mastitis
• Metritis
• Retained Placenta

The traits defined as disease resistance traits, are designed to help predict animals that are more resistant to health events. The CDCB health evaluations will be presented as percentage points above or below the breed average of event resistance.

For example, evaluations of cows born in the base year will average zero. Favorable values for resistance to the health event will result in a positive value. Assuming the resistance to clinical mastitis is 90%, which represents a 10% incidence rate. If a bull has a PTA equal to +3.0 for mastitis resistance, daughters of that bull would on average be more resistant to mastitis by 3 percentage points more than the population average.

For this information to be as accurate as possible, animal health evaluations have to be submitted by the community on a regular basis. Producers recording this information and actively reporting health events on-farm is a critical component to developing a national database.

Ultimately what does genetic selection for health traits mean for the individual dairy farmer? It could mean hundreds of dollars saved on reducing treatments and lost production. Sire selection for these new health traits will lower occurrence of these illnesses over time reducing the costs associated with the treatment.

How Will Analyzing Health Data Now Benefit Your Dairy?

The most common use of health records on a dairy is usually done one cow at a time. This is done to evaluate whether an individual cow should be removed from the herd by evaluating how many health problems an individual cow has experienced. Depending on data entry methods and priority of the particular cow, the recording of that data may be inconsistent from one cow to another. And depending on the reason a cow was removed from a herd, the final health event may not have been recorded at all.

Though this type of information is important, it does not help answer questions about the health management of a herd. Knowing the number of cases of mastitis that led to a group of cows leaving the herd requires statistics that are consistent among that group of cows.

Accurate and consistent health records help you answer questions for the entire herd and help you evaluate your management practices to make sure that not only are individual cows treated properly, but that protocols for the whole herd are effective.

If you see an increase of new disease episodes, in general are your disease prevention practices working? Of those cases that are treated, are your treatment protocols effective and have they reduced the recurrence of the disease?

Routine analysis of whole herd reports help provide hard evidence to effectively evaluated protocols and practices that have been established by management.