9 Nov 2015
Roger Evans
Job Title
It’s not that I can put a date on this, but I can still clearly remember the advent of dry cow therapy and how it became best practice to treat all the cows in your herd with antibiotics when they were “dried off”.
Very important, the dry period in a cow’s year.
It’s a time of rest and recuperation. It’s a time to rebuild body resources so when that cow calves again she is ready to milk well in her new lactation and be in good shape so she can compete in a herd environment. And, of course, it is a time to grow the calf she is carrying.
The way we manage our cows when they are dry also means they are off concrete for a couple of months as well – which they seem to enjoy. So this dry period was also seen as an opportunity to give the udder a good “clear out”. By introducing antibiotics to the udder while the cow was not lactating, she would enter her next lactation with a fresh start.
As the practice of dry cow therapy was encouraged it became a norm within our industry. It started off as something you should do and moved to wide acceptance as something you would never dare not to do.
A wide range of dry cow antibiotics are available today to cater for what has become a multi-million pound element of our industry. The practice has been further refined by the use of teat sealants after the antibiotics to isolate the udder and prevent any more nasty bugs entering. (Teat sealants need to be removed from each teat thoroughly when the cows are calved again, lest they end up in the milk where they are the bane of cheese makers’ lives).
I don’t want to appear more of a smart arse than I normally do, but, in some ways, the blanket use of antibiotics as a management tool has always felt uncomfortable.
As an unlikely analogy I am reminded of broiler chicken production, which we are also involved in. There was a time when it was quite common to treat a whole flock of birds with antibiotics in their food or water. Instead, we should have been asking ourselves what we were doing with these chickens that made this necessary in the first place. As an aside, we have reduced the stocking rate of our broiler sheds by about a third and the improvement in their living conditions and environment is quite remarkable. The birds have never looked so well and content, and I would have been quite comfortable showing them to anybody. That improvement in itself raises questions about stocking densities we should not ignore.
That is why the comparison with dairy herd management and broiler production is not the unlikely analogy it first appears. If our ultimate goal is to reduce the possibility of antibiotics entering the food chain, the big question has to be, “what is fundamentally wrong with a cow’s environment that makes it necessary to use a blanket approach to antibiotic use across the herd?” Or, if there are issues on your farm that make the use of antibiotic dry cow therapy an essential norm, what are you doing to address those issues?
One major milk buyer is already asking these questions of its milk supplying farmers. The questions at this stage are fairly benign, but I suspect a very few years down the road it will offer a mix of bonuses or penalties to hasten the process.
National Milk Records, as part of its offering, is pulling together bulk milk tests, individual cow tests and information on mastitis incidence so dairy farmers can target individual dry cow therapy to where it is needed. Information that will tell you where it is and is not needed, and which cow will need which antibiotics to treat which pathogens. Many herds are already cutting back on dry cow treatment with no obvious downside with regard to cell count or mastitis incidence. They can probably do this because their management and the housing of their cows is of the very highest standards. That will have to become a norm.
It’s an oft-repeated adage of mine that there will never be an end to what science can tell us about our cows by examining the contents of that little pot of milk we take at milk recording time. Milk recording began as a means of identifying individual cow yields as an aid to breeding better replacement stock. Fat and protein content knowledge was a further aid to that process. That is still very true for those farmers who seek to breed high-yielding herds.
However, there are farmers like ourselves who are only looking for yields of 6,000 to 6,500 litres per cow. The cows we keep have the genetic ability to do those sorts of yields without trying too hard and we try to achieve that by making as much use as we can of grass and fodder. For us, the health screening we get from that regular individual milk sample is much more important than individual yields.
In Norway they have used a different approach for three decades. Farms have focused on breeding for health and, as a result, antibiotic use has reduced dramatically. Dairy farmers are obliged by law to record all health issues, (their average herd size is only 25 so it’s a bit different to the UK). Vaccination programmes are not a norm and dry cow is only used in exceptional circumstances. Health data has never been easier to collect with modern electronics and recording societies are well placed to organise this. As an industry we probably need to know just how many antibiotics we are using. At present we don’t.
Twenty-five cows go down on a local farm. One week later we pass our annual test. I am given a hand-painted milk jug of live badgers and dead cows.
