There are so many things to get right on dairy farms, none more important than the twice daily task (or sometimes 3 x daily task) of milking the cows.

SHEPHERD AGRI can help with all aspects of this apart from actually coming and milking them! But we do know people that can help you with that!

• Veterinary advice should come from the Vet for that farm, but Graham Shepherd can advise and recommend other advisors and consultants
• Testing the milking machine routinely or part of a trouble shooting exercise
• Suggesting, supplying and installing improvements to the dairy engineering to improve milking machine function
• Supplying effective and good value products in our UDDER HEALTH Section for

1. Teat  disinfection and skin condition
2. Cleaning the dairy plant, including automating the cleaning
3. Cubicle Hygiene
4. Liners and Tubing
5. Teat Sealant and Cell-Check CMT

A QUESTION FOR YOU- Do you have more than 40 cases of mastitis per 100 cows per year? Whether you do or don’t, it is still vitally important to measure it, monitor the causes and keep on top of it. I don't want to state the obvious, but cases of mastsitis are bad for animal wellbeing, farmer morale, milk production, milk quality, food hygiene & farm profit.

There are a range of different bacteria which can cause mastitis and in order to know the best way to target the problem, it is important to know what the major bugs are that are causing the problems. Are they environmental? Or Infectious? Or both? This information can help to understand whether the problem can be reduced through environmental hygiene, practices in the milking parlour and/or milking machine function.

Do your liners needs changing? take a look here

Products to improve hygiene include: TK Gold Dust, a bedding powder to help improve cubicle hygiene. Click here to see the full range of disinfectants.

If mastitis remains high despite high levels of hygiene in the environment, good milking machine function and best prectices being followed in the milking parlour, it may be possible that the cows immunity could be compromised. This can happen for a number of reasons, however two to consider are mycotoxins in feed causing a problem and also trace element or vitamin deficiency.