Blending in with the herd may be costing you thousands
One of these cows will cost you $240 on average this year. She has mastitis. Which one? Which quarter is infected?
Subclinical Mastitis
Using the measures available to dairies today, both look fine because they are under the threshold of 200 (200,000) somatic cells. (Anything above that is assumed to indicate mastitis.) But the cow with a somatic cell count (SCC) of 78 had subclinical mastitis. You couldn’t see it yet. You couldn’t detect it with SCC or the California Mastitis Test (CMT) yet. Without a new tool from AAD, she blends in with the herd. Her subclinical mastitis would progress until it’s detectable, but by then she will have reduced her milk yield, blended her high SCC milk with other cows’ low SCC milk, and she may have spread microorganism that can infect many others. So blending in with the herd really may be costing you thousands.
But how did we detect the earliest stages of mastitis if current methods can’t? We harnessed the power of her body’s immune response using differential cell counts. Culture later confirmed we were right. Our goal is to give dairies this information in three minutes or less – at the quarter level. That way, dairies treat only infected quarters and can do so before little problems become big ones. Learn more about differential cell counts and the technology we are developing for dairy farms.