Since today is a monday I spent all of my time working on my internship project and the paperwork it entails. I know I've complained about it in the past, especially the excel stuff, but I'm really proud that I've gotten a lot of it done. The biggest part that I've been working on is the dairy protocol analysis, or dairy protocol assessment.
I've mentioned dairy protocol assessment a lot but I don't think I explained it too well in the past. Here's a quick crash course in dairy protocol 101.
Dairy protocol is the system used to milk the cows. This system has several parts that ensure that the process is sanitary, safe, and productive. These steps include:
- Forestripping (quickly milking the cows by hand to stimulate milk production)
- California Mastitis Test (testing the milk to see if the cow has mastitis. This infection is not only painful for the cow but it also makes the milk unusable)
- Suckling (allowing the calves to drink some milk which stimulates milk production again)
- Pre-dipping (sanitizing the teats after the calves have suckled)
- Drying (quickly drying the teats)
- Unit connection (connecting the milking unit to the udder)
- Unit disconnection (disconnection the unit from the udder)
The first 5 steps should take no longer than 2 minutes to complete. The more time we spend on this part of the milking the less milk will be produced. As for the unit connection and disconnection, that time should be no longer than 6 minutes. This saves some milk for the calves, keeps teat structures intact, and is less painful for the cows. We see if we follow these advised times by recording when each step takes place on this rubric.
After we fill out this rubric, I go back to my computer and enter the times in a excel spreadsheet (yes, the ones I have been spending so much time on).
Isn't it pretty?
Once I've filled in the spreadsheet I make histograms of the time from forestripping to unit connection, the time from unit connection to unit disconnection, and the comparison of milk yield to the time spent milking. These charts are really good visuals and they really hit home.
These are the charts from July 26th
As you can see, we only followed the recommended time with 2 cows. The majority of the cows took 6 minutes to connect and 1 took as long as 9 minutes! These times are so high because the workers try to work on 4 different cows at once, which sounds like it would make the process quicker when in reality it only lengthens the time spent on each cow. This is one of the biggest problems we have at the lecheria.
On this chart you can see that we only milk 19 cows within the recommended time limit. The most time we spent milking a cow this day was 12 minutes, which is twice the recommended time limit. We've even had one of the cows milked for 13 minutes! This is extremely painful for the cows, it ruins their teats, and makes them vulnerable to mastitis. We had 6 cases of mastitis within the past week and only 1 of those cows was milked within the recommended milking time. This is the biggest problem we have at the lecheria.
This one shows the correlation between the time spent milking and the amount of milk produced. The milk yield is usually higher the longer the cow is milked, however, this isn't good in the long run. The longer we milk the cows the less they'll be able to produce in the future. It would be a better investment to spend less time milking, get less milk now, and preserve the milk glands than over milk the cow now and prevent it from producing more milk in the future.
I hope I did a better job of explaining what I've been doing lately. This is a big part of my welfare assessment project since dairy cows are kept to produce milk. If we make this process quicker and painless for the cows they better their emotional, physical, and mental state will be.
If you want to learn more about this system, let me know in the comments or message me on facebook!
Thanks for reading you guys!
-Allie
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