Rubrics!

Hey guys!

So I went to the farm today and I got a lot of work done.

In addition to taking down the usual milk yields for Dona Yamy and Don Yan, I took some notes of my own. I created a milking rubric with Profe Moro yesterday and I chose 10 cows to take data from.

When each of these cows were in the dairy parlor I took down their ID numbers and recorded how much time was spent on each step listed above. There's forestripping, which is milking the cow for 30 seconds or so to see how well the milk is coming out, CMT, which is short of California Mastitis Test (a test that we perform by milking each teat into a palate and adding a chemical that changes the texture of the milk if it's mastitis positive), suckling, which is when we allow the calves to suckle in order to stimulate milk production, sanitizing, how long they're being milked for, and how much milk they produce.

Since today's a tuesday we didn't forestrip the cows or test them for mastitis. We should be doing this every day that we milk, but the staff only do these steps when students come in on wednesday and saturday. Every other step was completed and I recorded all of the time spent on each step. I won't post the entire sheet (because nobody will probably care about it) but here's some of it. Just keep in mind that each cow is different and certain cows are handled differently. The recorded times aren't always 100% correct because I was trying to keep track of the milk production rates of all of the cows, but it's a solid estimate.

With this data and other things I observed I made some of these generalized conclusions:

• Holstein Brahman mixes are milked longer than any other breed
• Cows with thicker teats have the unit weighted down by a heavy hand sized stone. This practice is supposed to pump more milk but the highest yielding cows didn't have the extra weight. The stone also causes the teats to become thicker and malformed.
• Cows that were milked longer were more likely to kick off the unit.
• We're letting calves suckle for too long. The longest time given was 2 minutes and 3 seconds when we should only allow them to suckle for 30 seconds
• More milking time doesn't always mean more milk. A cow that was milked for 5 minutes and 42 seconds yielded more milk than a cow that was milked for 9 minutes and 20 seconds (which is way too long)
• Longer suckling doesn't really increase the milk yield, it just adds more time to the milking process

All of this information is really important to see what things need to be changed in the milking area. This plays a big part in my welfare projects as well since the milking process is a big part of these cows' lives. If the milking process is consistent and less painful, the cows will be healthier, enjoy the milking process, and produce more milk.

That's all for today guys! I'm sorry that these posts keep getting shorter and shorter, but I don't want to write lengthy posts that are dry and boring. I hope you don't mind!

See ya!

-Allie