The Synergy Mastitis team has a new initiative running. We’re putting together small groups of dairy farms to work together on udder health. Groups will be between 4-8 farms, based on geography.
How it works and what is included
• Milking time assessment – a visit evaluating your milking routine and testing your plant (robots included).
• Mastitis assessment – a separate visit looking at mastitis data and environmental findings.
• Your Mastitis Control Plan – using the findings of the visits above to put together a report and plan, with a top five actions list for your farm.
• Group meeting – compare findings with the other farms in your group and discuss practical solutions and interventions.
• Series of follow-up farm walks – 6-12 months on, to check progress and talk through anything that’s cropped up.
• Ongoing support – a group WhatsApp and your own named udder health vet, throughout.
What mastitis costs
AHDB puts a single clinical case at £250–£300 once vet treatment, discarded milk and lost yield are counted. Subclinical infection is also financially important, with herd yield reducing 2.5% for every 100,000 cells above a bulk milk count of 200,000. A herd sitting at 300,000 is forfeiting around 2.5% of its milk cheque before any individual case costs are considered.
What a control plan can achieve
The Mastitis Control Plan was tested in a randomised controlled trial across 52 dairy farms, published in the Veterinary Record. The trial recruited herds running more than 35 cases per 100 cows a year. After only twelve months, farms on the control plan had around 22% lower incidence of clinical mastitis. Among farms implementing more than two-thirds of the recommendations, reductions of up to 36% were
subsequently reported.
Take a 200-cow herd at that 35-case rate – 70 cases a year. A 22% cut is 15 cases avoided, worth £3,750-£4,500. Against a package price of £1,600 (about the same as six cases), that is a pretty attractive investment… You would only need to avoid those six cases, under 9%, to break even.
But implementation is everything
The trial showed what can be achieved when farms engage closely with the process. However, the subsequent national rollout was less successful: across 841 herds, the incidence rate of cows affected fell by just 3% overall.
Even among herds implementing at least two-thirds of their recommendations, the reduction was only 10%. This highlights the difficulty of turning a control plan into consistent action and meaningful results on farm.
Which is where the group comes in
Finding practical solutions that work for your system, your cows and your farm is what makes lasting change possible. That’s exactly what the group is designed to help with. We will have a bunch of farms wrestling with a variety of problems. Farmers are extremely resourceful people and will come up with far more practical solutions than I could manage. I believe this “hive mind” approach could be extremely powerful in the execution phase of the plan, as well as adding an element of competition and peer pressure, perhaps….
The cost
£1,600 per farm – a 10% saving against booking the same work individually. Places are limited to 8 farms per group. If you’d like to take part, or find out any more please get in touch with your routine vet.
Written by Josh Hosford, Veterinary Surgeon
