We now have access to a newly created computer programme by QMMS and Nottingham University that can help target our attention on your mastitis issues – QuarterPro. This programme combines milk recording data with calving dates and clinical mastitis records to determine whether a farm’s mastitis issue stems from the environment (either dry period or milking cow
accommodation) or from a contagious pathogen. Many of our farms have already received their results and hopefully more of you will see the benefit of finding out where to focus your time and effort to bring down your cell counts and reduce your cases of clinical mastitis.
As with all computer analysis, the results rely on the quality of the data we can put in, hopefully you are all keeping records of your clinical mastitis cases – give us access to those (ideally 18-24 months of data but we can work with less if necessary) and your milk recording data (many of you already have us authorised as a third party to view your information, if you don’t let us know so we can get the paperwork done for this) and the programme will narrow down whether you have an Environmental Dry Period (mostly dry cow shed), Environmental Lactational (mostly milking cow housing, Contagious Lactational (mostly parlour routine/equipment/hygiene) and/or Heifer
Specific issues. This quick and easy programme demonstrates where we need to focus our
attentions to improve your mastitis and indicates which areas need further investigation.
If you are interested in knowing more about this programme, then please give us a call and chat to one of the vets, or speak to us when you see us out on farm and we can talk more about how we can collate the data needed to get the ball rolling with improving your milk quality.
