OK, so it's 602. Let's start. So again, good evening to everybody.

Happy to be with you today. My name is Audrey Brunet. I am the marketing and technical manager for Minan for Central Eastern Europe and Middle Eastern Africa for their back.

Welcome to this, to the first episode of our Webach milk quality miniseries, so this first episode called Masittis was the boss new tool for no problem. It is part of . Of, yes, mini focusing on the management, meal quality and the management of clinical mastitis, mainly, of 33 episodes.

So today we have our first episode and there will be a second one, focusing more on diagnosis around the mid end of June and the third one will be focusing more on the really management of clinical mastitis and treatment, end of end of September. Before we start, just a few technical information, as you may see on your screen, there is a, a chat, chat room, where you can, when you can, where you can share some comment and, some technical issue. But for question, please use the Q&A box, at the right side of your screen, I guess, and we will we will answer your question regularly during the, during the, the webinar.

And last but not least, we will also ask you to participate. There will be some pools during the the presentation and you will have to answer and of course it will be better if you can participate so that we will have your input on some questions. So that's it for the technical part.

Now you may ask yourself why we have decided to develop this, this project, as we are all aware that the population is growing on the, on the planet and so more people means more people to feed and we know that dairy products are part of our nutrition and the needs are also growing. In addition to that, the consumer requirements are also growing in terms of quality, safety and traceability for the product. And within Vach for regarding our verback dairy strategy, we also know that Apico make a better milk.

That's why we have developed with international expert our target 150 programme and this is all resumed in 11 book here. This target 150 programme has an objective to help dairy professional for sustainable production of milk. And this programme takes into account the main pillar of dairy farming which are welfare, reproduction, nutrition and and milk quality based on the evaluation of a key performance indicator.

So today we will talk about milk quality with you because we know that the effect of milk quality on production, animal welfare, and the farm finance makes it a major concern for most dairy farms. We also, we also know that the main disease on dairy farm is still mastitis and there are still improvements to be done on that because it affects the profitability of the. Of the, of the farm, of course, and the and the welfare of the animals and their production.

So like I said, this webinar is part of a 3 episode series on milk quality, and today, so this first episode, mastitis with the boss, new tool for no problem will address some fundamental questions related to, related to mastitis management with clear definition of what is a clinical subclinical mastitis, but also intramammary infection. It will also cover the whole plethora of mastitis negative effects and we will talk also about the hidden costs related to infertility and increased risk of infectious disease transmission, and we, we plan also to provide you some some tools for veterinarian but also farm manager. To monitor, milker routine and milking parlour use and also, we hope that it will pro provide you also some tools to start to discuss more about the milker training and the incentive.

So now, I'm very happy to introduce you our speaker. In fact, he is the writer of the milk quality part of our target 150 metres. So Ricardo Bexiga.

He will animate this, all the three episodes of our. Ricardo has a huge experience in milk quality. He worked after graduating, he worked as a practitioner on the dairy cattle farm for several years and also as a faculty concurrently was working as a faculty of veterinary medicine on mastiti diagnosis.

He yeah, he was also a resident at the European College of Bovin Health Management in Glasgow, Scotland, and he has been a diplomat from there since . 2011. Now he's currently a lecturer still at the faculty of Veterinary Medicine in Lisbon on different topics production, animal clinic, reproduction and obstetrics, her health and microbiology, and he still works in parallel in a clinical practise.

He has he wrote many articles and books on the the topic of, milk quality, and the last but not least, he's a former president of the Portuguese Biatric Association. So Ricardo, the, the skin is yours, sorry. And yes, please, if you have questions, use the Q&A box.

Thank you. Well, thank you for the, for the kind invitation, for the generous words. Good evening to everybody.

I hope you can understand me. I, I'll try to speak in my best English, and thank you to Wilbach for, for again this invitation to, to present on this topic which is very dear to me. .

And actually, it's, it's quite a challenge to talk to, to, to vets and to farm managers from different countries about something that most of them know quite well, but hopefully I can bring some new information about, about this, about this topic in, in the next hour and certainly in the next two episodes as well. So like you heard Audrey mention in the, in the beginning, there will be some, well, surveys or questions throughout the presentation, not many, but I would just like to test that just now, with a very simple question about what did you have for lunch today. So we'll see if this, launches correctly and You can now answer.

They will stay up normally for about about 20 seconds so that you can reply. And then we'll see the results. This is, this is going to be very simple.

So, OK, so I guess you're all seeing, The results now, majority of meat, meat eating, I'm slightly disappointed that only 10% got beer for lunch, you know, but anyway, so we'll carry on. This is working. This was just really to, to, to, for a quick test of what of what things, you know, more technical questions in, in the, in the future of the presentation.

So, quite simply, what is a mastitis? Well, everybody more or less knows it's the inflammation of the mammary glands, most often of infectious origin, OK? And for that, So characteristically, the inflammation has 4 cardinal signs.

So the heat, the redness, the pain, and the swelling, they can all be present in, in, in, in, in the case of mastitis. But sometimes we do forget that there might be also another sign of inflammation, which is the loss of function, which is quite often the case, especially with more aggressive bacteria or with cows that are not, you know, fully immune competence and there is some issues in terms of resolving the inflammation, for example. So mastitis can be clinical, of course, this is mastitis that is that can be apparent on examination by the animal handler, normally the milker or the veterinarian, and you can have all different sorts of mastitis, you know, it could just be clots, it could be this gangrenous mastitis, or you can have a downer cow with a toxic mastitis as well.

And it's actually quite useful to, to grade the, the clinical mastitis severity. So normally we talk about 3 grades of clinical mastitis severity. So the first one, mild or grade 1, there will only be changes in the milk, you know, observable.

So there'll be more serious like secretion or there'll be clots, but only in the milk there are changes. So grade 2 or moderate, there will be changes to the milk and also to the mammary glands. So it will be swollen, it will be harder, warmer, or sometimes cooler actually.

And that's the grade 2. And then you have the grade 3 or more severe mastitis, in which you have changes to the milk, to the other, and to the cow. OK, so the cow will have increased rectal temperature, it will be very low milk production or it will be off feed, something like that, that shows that the cow has some systemic.

Signs of disease as well. This might seem a bit academic when you talk about these grades to classify the mastitis, because it's actually quite useful if you're determining a certain therapeutic approach. So for example, if you, if you're using on-farm culture systems like we do see in my part of the world, quite often bigger farms are using these on-farm culture systems.

Quite extensively. This should be limited to grades 1 and 2 clinical mastitis. So only if you have changes in the milk or in the milk and in the mammary gland should you, do the bacteriology on farm and not treat in the first day as opposed to, you know, more severe clinical mastitis, grade 3 in which you should go directly for treatment.

With Antiy royals. So the subclinical mastitis is an inflammation of the mammary gland, which is not detectable with the human eye and it needs a certain You know, another test, an ancillary test for the diagnosis for its detection. Normally, the most frequent one will be the California mastitis test or the counting of the, of the somatic cells, OK, through, for example, the milk record.

There are other ways, you know, increased per increase electrical conductivity or others that may also be present on some farms, but these two are by far the most frequently performed. OK? It's, it's important that we then distinguish the inflammation from the infection.

So the infection is The presence of, of the colonisation with bacteria or other microorganisms present in the secretory tissue or in the tubules of the mammary glands, and that might be diagnosed through bacteriology, conventional bacteriology, or nowadays also through a PCR performed on aseptically obtained milk sample, OK? So, quite briefly, what happens when you have an infection. You have, for example, an E.

Coli, gaining access to the secretary tissue of the mammary gland through a teat canal is that you have, you'll have some leukocytes present in that milk, and they will be, you know, patrolling the area and, and once they detect the presence of an invading microorganism, they'll release some infla inflammation mediators, and these will, among other things, increase the vascular permeability of, of the blood vessels present, in the mammary glands. And with increased permeability, you'll get an increased number of leukocytes passing on from the, from the blood to the milk. And, and, and therefore, you'll have an increased somatic cell count which is composed mostly of, of, of leukocytes.

Of course, this increased permeability will also cause many other changes to the composition of milk. You might see increase. Increased levels of concentrations of certain ions and therefore you'll have some increased electrical conductivity.

Also, you might have some increased levels of certain enzymes and therefore you might have a decreased, decreased duration of the shelf life of the milk, or you'll have changes to the flavour of the milk, etc. Etc. So you have on all parts, the infection and the other part, the inflammation, the reaction to that infection.

One question that we that I sometimes get asked by, by, by farmers, especially when they're making their clinical mastitis records, is when should they consider a new mastitis case? And if you go through the literature, you might find different views from different authors, and And that's, that's fine. Like my, my view is that if there is enough time for the milk withdrawal to pass after one treatment, we should probably consider the second treatment as a second mastitis case.

OK? So you need to consider two points of view. One is the Financial point of view, if you do two treatments separated by a few days, for example, for a couple of weeks, each treatment will have a separate economic impacts on the farm.

So if you're treating once and then you're stopping for, for 4 or 5 days, something like that, the withdrawal periods of the of the antibiotic you're using and then restart treatment, . You're going to have the impacts of the two full treatments and, and, and for that reason, you probably should consider two separate treatments because they will both have a cumulative impact on the farm economy. Of course, if you're talking about the, the, the, the physiology or the, the, you know, the, the, the pathophysiology of what's actually going on, it's probably the same bacteria that is, is, is causing both cases.

So bacteriologically, it's the same mastitis. But financially, you might have, you know, 2 episodes of mastitis. So quite often what you'll have is the chronic subclinical mastitis that every once in a while will have clinical flare-ups, OK?

So that's important for you to understand. You know, if you have recurrent cases of mastitis in the same quarter in the same cow, you should probably, you know, think about when is it safe to actually, well, stop treatment in that, in that quarter, when should you actually consider that. For that, it's very important for you to have good, good records of clinical mastitis.

So the, the impact, the impact of mastitis is, is, is very high. It's probably one of the two most important or diseases with the most impact on the, on the, on the farm, so the other being probably infertility, but, you know, the, the, the, the impact of mastitis is, is very high and that shows, for example, in, in being one of The first reasons, if not the first reason for culling dairy cows on many farms. Certainly, some work that has been done here in my country in Portugal, showed that about 30% of all the dairy cows that were culled were due to either mastitis or You know, other problems.

Other problems meaning they had, for example, another that was not very well positioned anymore, you know, the, the, the, it was kind of down due to the suspensory ligaments being more being distended. So not just mastitis, but sometimes other problems which are a minority of these, these problems. OK, so first reason for calling and dairy cows on many, on many farms.

And it's the first reason for antimicrobial use in dairy cows. Interesting data coming from England or looking at over 500 dairy farms showed that they, they were treating on average 45, sorry, 47 mastitis cases per 100 cows per year. OK, this might be different.

Some countries might be bigger, it might be higher than this, but certainly it's, it's, it's a measure of, of over 500 farms. Most farmers, nearly 100% of the farmers treated clinical mastitis with intramammary antibiotics, and a very high number, 85% of the farmers also used intramammary antibiotics on every cow. In every quarter a dry off.

OK, so this will change for sure, within the next couple of years because the European Union will will change or will issue legislation to prevent Treatment, preventive treatment with antibiotic, on, on, in cattle. So we'll see when that comes around to, to, to, to be a European wide course of action. So, I don't know if, if you have.

Yeah, Ricardo, yeah, I, I have a question for you, but it was more relating to the previous slide, but when do you usually kill a cow because of mastitis? Well, it culling a cow because of mastitis, it's, it depends on different other aspects, depends of, you know, the number of lactations, the number of of if the cow is pregnant or not. Farmers tend not to cull cows in the first lactation because of mastitis so readily.

Also, if they are pregnant, they might be a bit . You know, they, they, they probably won't call her at, at, at that time. They might wait until she cos again.

We're lucky in a way that cows have 4 quarters, so you can call one quarter instead of. Calling the whole cow, and most often the, the production is limited not by the number of lactating quarters, but by the capacity of the rumen. I'm talking if they have 33 quarters.

If they have 2, it's a different issue. But normally, If, if there is a recurrent mastitis in one quarter, I'll normally do 2 treatments with antibiotics. After that, I'll just start using non-steroidals, and I might leave the cow until she calves down again if she's pregnant.

But it also, I might suggest that the farmer stops milking that quarter. I don't, some, some people. It's, it's, it's no longer that many people, but some farmers still inject something to, to destroy chemically the quarter.

I don't think that's a good idea at all. I normally just stop milking that quarter, preferably after she's gone the peak yield of lactation, and then you just need to mark that quarter very well so that the milkers don't milk it again. And I just leave it at that.

So, short answer, I would treat twice. I'll give it to, to Two shots, I guess, a treatment with antibiotics, and if it continues having clinical cases, then I would just call that quarter. OK?

OK. And another question that came also when we were talking, can you clarify the EU regulation about DC treatment? Yeah, well, as much as, as much as I, as much as I know about it because it's, it's still not a European wide, it's still not in effect.

Some countries, for example, in Germany, it's, it's forbidden to make antibiotic treatments, preventive antibiotic treatments. So you need to have a disease before you can actually treat. And what What happens with dry cow therapy is that quite often if you're treating every quarter dry off, some will be infected and some will not be infected.

What the European Union is saying that will probably start in 2022 is that you need to prove that the cow is infected before you can actually use dry cow therapy with antibiotics. OK, so the Dutch, I think the Dutch do this based on somatic cell counts, and I think the Danish, for example, do it on bacteriology. I don't know what what what the means will be.

Maybe it's not the same for, for, for, for every country, but there certainly needs to be a proof of the presence of an infection. Before you can actually use antibiotics. And that will be the case for respiratory disease as well, I guess, and, and, and, and other situations.

OK, OK. So, so, just, just completing what I was saying about the, the, the impact of my site is, 11 aspect that also came out of this, of this paper is that the second most used, formulation for, for intramammary treatment had 4 antibiotics, and the 3rd was a, 4th generation cephalosporin. OK, so probably not, not a good idea to, to have 4 antibiotics in, in, in one, in one inmammary tube or to use 4th generation .

Cephalosporins. OK, so these again will probably be not available in in a not so near future for the whole of Europe. This is the case already for some countries, not, not in Portugal, by the way.

We have, we have plenty of saquanome. We have something the last time I counted, we had 9 formulations of saquanome, but I'm, I'm suggesting to my To most of my, most of my clients, most of the farmers I work with, that we should probably get ready for, for this, and we should probably start. Decreasing the use of such, such formulations.

OK. So, another question I would like to ask now is how much do you think an episode of clinical mastitis costs? So 4 options around €50 around the 100s, around 200, or around €300.

Let's see what your opinion is for. An average cost of clinical mastitis. Just wait a few seconds.

OK, most, most of you replied around 100 years and the second most frequent answer was around 200 years, which is really close to, to, to what it should. What it should be. OK, so it depends what, what you read and what paper you read, for example, one of the papers I normally quote is, is a Dutch paper back from 2008, but it's really well, made, so they, they came up with a value of €210.

1 of my master's students, I actually looked at 39 farms in Portugal and she got a slightly lower value of €118 but somewhere between 100 and €200 for the average cost of a clinical mastitis. And classically, what you have to incorporate, and this is something that you can actually do with the farmer or with the milkers when you're doing the training so that they understand what actually comes into the Price of the mastitis and the cost and actually understand how much impact there is on a single case. You should add the drop in the milk production, the wasted milk, of course, the cost of the of the drugs, the extra label, sorry, the extra labour.

Quite often the, the milkers say that, OK, for the mastitis group, I spend as much time as milking, you know, I don't know, 50 cows or something like that. The penalties that you might get from the industry, the premature culling, the eventual death, of course, there will be few animals dying, but the price of that animal will also go into the average clinical case and the extra visits by by the vet, OK? Now, what I would like to cover in the next few slides is actually the hidden costs of mastitis, something that you normally, you normally don't see incorporated in the average cost of a clinical case of mastitis.

11 such hidden cost is the cost in infertility. So this is very well established, as you can see this, this is a, this chart here is from a paper which is now 20 years old and in which the authors already saw. That they had a significant difference between cows with no mastitis and with both clinical or subclinical mastitis, subclinical mastitis in terms of their fertility in this case, expressed as stays open.

So this is very well established in, in the literature, this impacts. And, and also it's very well characterised. So we know now that it depends on the somatic cell count level, so a higher level of somatic cells will lead to a bigger problem.

Depends on the time of the increase in somatic cells, if it's subclinical, so around AI, it has a bigger impact, especially in the, in the case of this paper before AI, up to 10 days before AI. Also in the clinical mastitis, in, in relation to the artificial insemination timing, and what kind of pathogen is also involved with a bigger impact, being observed from gram-negative bacteria than from gramme positive. And there are many mechanisms by which This impacts from both clinical and subclinical mastitis might be occurring.

So there might be, or it's, it's been observed that there are actually changes to the ovarian structure. So there's more fibrous tissue, more connective tissue, and, and, and less vasculature. So it's the, the blood supply to the ovary seems to be impaired and that leads to the smaller follicles, for example.

Also, There, there, there's been observations of delayed ovulation due to low plasma esterile or lower delays, LH surge. OK, so again, one other mechanism that is well characterised also early embryonic death when there are increased levels of inflammatory mediators. OK, let's not forget the prostaglandins which we use to, to For example, to induce part tuation are also released during, infla inflammatory inflammatory processes as well.

OK, so there are different possible mechanisms that are at role here and that's why you see both with clinical and subclinical mastitis an impact on, on on fertility. Another aspect which I I've done some, some, some work on is the potential increase in infectious disease transmission through waste milk being fed to cows. So, we know we all have waste milk on our farms.

Some estimates are between 1 and 4% of all the milk produced does not go into human consumption, so it's a huge amount of milk. And of course, we all, you know. Pressed by the economics of the financial situation of the farm and quite a number of farms will feed this waste milk to calves, and that goes on all around the world.

So for example, here about 50% in Canada, 80% in Sweden, 83% in England and Wales, and these are very large surveys with over, for example, this last 1/500 farms. We also looked at this. We did, we did the survey here on 37 farms, and we found that about 90% of these, of these farmers fed waste milk to calves.

And then, then what we did was we did a PCR on 3 samples of the milk that was being fed to these calves, and we found that over 50% of the waste milk had evidence of Bacteria and part tuberculosis via a PCR that was performed. So, a very efficient way for us to be transmitting tuberculosis to our younger generation on farm is to use unpasteurized, waste milk. So we have seen, certainly here in my country, we've seen a lot of farmers buy Pasteurizers both for the milk and for the colostrum to try to control part tuberculosis or even other microbial agents such as mycoplasma if they have that problem as well.

Another, another possible hidden cost is the the rise in antimicrobial resistance. So there might be, if you feed waste milk with antimicrobials, especially if they are in subtherapeutic doses, you'll be submitting all the gut flora. To these subtherapeutic doses and you'll be selecting probably to for, for antimicrobial resistance, OK?

And like I said before, pasteurisation, pasteurisation is great. It, it kills all the, the bacteria that is present in milk, but it does not affect. Antibiotics as is seen here on this, on this, on this graph which compares, pasteurised and non-pasteurized milk samples in the presence of in this case, different antibiotics.

OK. We did, we did also work on, on this, on this topic. I've, I've just recently submitted a paper to, to the Journal antibiotics about this, and we looked at the faecal E.

Coli, so we, we collected faeces from calves. That were being fed this waste milk and we found that these 30, 37% of these E. Coli from the calves had extended spectrum methylmais.

OK, so conferring them resistance not just to penicillin, but also to 2, 3rd and 4th generation cephalosporin. So again, another negative aspect potentially caused by excess mastitis on on our farm. Ricardo, one question, and so at the end, what do you do with this waste milk?

If you said you don't use it for the calf. That's, that's. I, I don't have an answer for that.

Unfortunately, there's no good answer for, for that yet because If you decide then to put it in the in the slurry and spread it on the fields, that might have an impact as well. So certainly there will be maize or ryegrass or something growing in that field. Also, if you, for example, use it as bedding material, now we have many farms starting to use the the recycled manure solids on farm, they will be there, present.

And there'll be, you know, also, I guess recycled. So there's no, no answer so far. I know that there's some, there's some investigation, some research being done on, on that area, but for now, there is no, no real good answer, .

Some, some of my students actually asked that to me and I, and I gave them an example of why I asked them also, so when you have a cold and you, you're on antibiotics, what do you do with the urine you produce as well. So it's not, it's not exclusive to us, but anyway, so certainly something that we should be looking into. OK.

Thank you. I guess, I guess, OK, I'm being a bit academic here, I guess. The, the least harmful situation would be if you feed this to the male calves that are not going to stay on the farm, so.

That's probably the last, the least impact you can, you can cause anyway. OK, so talking going over a few risk factors, I'm not going to go very extensively on these risk factors because you've all heard of them. You don't want to be.

Hearing them again, the risk factors for, for an infection, are all those that You know, make it easier for the, for the, you know, mastitis tests, the microorganisms to gain access to, the mammary gland. So, you know, poor environmental hygiene, you know, if, if it's a lactating cow or if it's a dry cow, let's not forget that the dry cow has a very, very high susceptibility to new intramammary infections. Immediately after she's dried off and immediately before calving, she has a very, very high possibility of getting new intramammary infections, so we cannot forget the dry cows.

Also, poor milking routine. And I would like to, to ask you to, to, to see, this, to watch this next video and please then answer what do you think is wrong with the, with the following milking routine. This is one of my, one of my clients, let me just get this out of the way, sorry.

So this is a 20 times 2. Milking parlour, they're milking around 540 cows. 3 milkings a day and they're now last week they were at 4042 litres per cow per day, OK?

They have 2 guys in the parlour, one of them gets the cows and takes them back. This guy, he's in a milking parlour a lot of the time on his own. So he did the first trip.

Now he's putting the pre. Preparing 10 cows at a time. So he's finished putting the pre On 0 cows and now he's starting to clean the ticks.

Now his colleague is coming back and he's starting. Also So now he's starting to attach one of them. OK, I guess you got the picture already.

So what do you think is wrong with this milking routine? So first option starts cleaning the teats where you finish putting the pre-dip. He's cleaning the teeth is the way of cleaning the teeth takes too little time.

The first stripping seems too short or all of the above. Just wait for the answers to come in. OK, so when for all of the all of the above.

Yeah, I mean, we see that he starts cleaning at the bottom end. So where, where he stops to put the pre-dip is where he starts cleaning. So the pre-dip doesn't have enough time to, to kill the bacteria.

So he should be really coming back. Cleaning the teeth, it takes too little time. I mean, it's, it barely takes them 1 2nd or it takes them rather, both of them are doing the same mistake.

Barely takes them 1 2nd to clean all four teeth, so they're not doing a good job. For stripping, yeah, I understand why, why people didn't vote for this because it's not, you don't see very well. What's going on, but also for stripping seems a bit, well, not, not, not perfect.

So certainly all of the above would be, would be right. OK, so another possibility in terms of infection is, is that transmission might be occurring in the milking parlour either because there is no separation of the infected cows or there is no disinfection of, of of of the of the teat liner, so, so of the milking units. Another situation is that you might actually have a very good milking parlour.

So that, that parlour there was, is about 5 years old, it's a good parlour. But also you might have a good parlour that is not being used in the proper way. OK, so I'm going to ask you again.

What is, if there is anything wrong, in this milking procedure. This is a brand new parlour, this is about a year old, so please let me know what you think is wrong with this. So I guess you get the picture more or less.

So is there anything wrong in this milking procedure? What do you think? So do you think there is straight voltage, so electrical currents going through the, the, the tubes, the pipes in the milking parlour, could that be bimodal milking?

Over milking or too many flies. What's the reason why the cow is not? Not, not enjoying the milking.

Yeah, over milking. You, you, you could see that the milking unit, there is no, almost no milk flow going through that. OK.

That is something that we see quite often. OK. So this, this is this is a graphic that shows, that is, is, is the output of a vadia, which is a system that I, we use, in our practise to measure, to measure vacuum in fact.

OK, so this is, this is a milking fairly, well, not, not, not a good milking, but anyway, it shows to it, it, it shows. Some, some issues. OK, here we have some milk going out of the, of the, of the other and then you have a period where there is no milk coming out of the other.

So therefore, the vacuum rises at the peak level and then you start having milk flow, you have the cow being milked normally and then the front quarters. Stop milking, so there's no more milk there, and then the rear quarters stop milking, and the, so, therefore the vacuum increases as there is no milk flow. And here, there is a period of over milking.

So this is just over milking. No, no milk coming out and the couch still has the clusters attached, OK? So we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll look a little bit more in, in, in a slide or two into that over milking and bimodality as well, OK?

I would just like to say that we were looking at issues with the increased possibility of infection, but also we need to deal with the inflammation, OK? The inflammation is, is, of course, it's a good thing. It's, it's an attempt for the cow to clear an intramammary infection, but it might not work so well.

OK. So in some cases, you'll have decreased immune competence, so the cow will be, you know, more in a in a poor condition with the same bacterial agents, or you might have excessive or unresolving reactions. So here, for example, Even though the milking unit is attached, there's no milk left in this, in this mammary gland in this quarter because she's had some clinical mastitis case and now she's lost function in this, in this quarter.

OK? One thing that is, is important for us to understand. Is that the, the severity of the clinical case is connected mostly with the immune competence of the animal.

So there's no E. Coli that is, you know, More pathogenic than, than another, well they might be, of course, but, but in different, for the purpose of the, the, the, the clinical mastitis in cows. The, the, the main factor that influences, you know, being a mild mastitis or being a downer cow with a toxic mastitis is actually the immune competence of the cow.

Of course, some pathogens are more, have a bigger impacts. For example, clubsella is, is has a bigger impact than E. Coli, for example.

OK, so if you see a mastitis outbreak, all of a sudden, or if you have a very high cell count, but you look at the milking routine, at the milking parlour, and the environment are good, my experience is that about 99% of the time, it does have something to do with the feeding. And I'm fortunate enough that in my, in my practise, it's 6 of us working together, and one of the guys. Only works with the nutrition.

So whenever we find a problem, I normally call him and we look at things from the nutritional point of view, OK. The most frequent reasons we encounter is problems that lead to immune immune problems, I guess, lack of immune competence is the first one is lack of control over what is being prepared. So the nutritionist prepares, does a diet formulation, but actually when you do analysis on the, on the, on the diet, which is in front of the cow, it's, it's nothing to do with what was supposed to be there, OK?

The other issue which is surprisingly frequent, frequent as well is the poor formulation. So we, we, we would think that the nutritionist, you know, it works with this every day, and everything should be OK, but quite often there is very poor formulation, so they actually have done it wrong, OK? Another very important aspect of nutrition or, or, or feeding rather.

That is important in, in, especially in the transition period is insufficient dry matter intake during the dry periods. So we know if we have You know, less than 10 kg dry matter intake in the close of dry period, we will probably see more infectious problems, more metabolic problems just after the cut. So we want to be in the 10 to 12 kg dry matter intake on especially on our farms that where we work with, to, to have Good results.

OK. The least frequent problem I see with, with feeding is the presence of microtoxin. It's very difficult to prove it does occur, but quite often it works almost as an escapegoat.

So the nutritionists, We'll, we'll talk about, oh, this is microtoxins, we'll have a marvellous for this, but really this should be the last thing being investigated, OK, because a lot of the times it's, it's just down to the cows not eating according to their needs, OK? Of course, I have, I have this million dollar question for you, how do we measure immune competence? So far, I know of no way of, of being able to do this in a competent way.

I would love to have it and I know a lot of vets that would love to have a way of an easy way of measuring the immune competence, OK? OK, so, so I've been talking a lot, a lot about probably things that you already know about, maybe not, nothing new, but I haven't presented many solutions to, to the problems. We know that the problems exist, but you know, what can we do to, to, to try to solve them.

Well, one thing that we need to be aware of is that milking is a very tough job. I always, when I'm talking to, to milkers, I always put this picture because I guess it makes me a bit popular among them, you know, you know, it's a very tough job. It's not for everybody.

And and it's actually, you know, it's actually true. They, they work long hours, and sometimes with With very cold and wet days, strange hours of the day, and you know, be it Christmas, be it whatever day it is, they they're there to milk the cows. So it's, it's a very tough job.

So because it's so, it tends to, you know, to have sometimes, you know, there might be fail fails to to this routine work. OK. So we need to have tools that allow us to monitor, to train the milkers and to motivate in whatever way, the milkers, OK?

So, now it depends a little bit on what kind of milking parlour you have. Most modern milking parlours will have an array of useful monitoring tools that you can use to monitor the work of the milker. So, you know, If if they will have a certain milking routine, they'll be, they'll be doing a certain number of tasks, but you can actually check what they're doing if they're doing it correctly.

So one thing that we could do is to measure the bimodality, OK? So the bimodality occurs when There is no constant, constant milk flow when you attach the cluster, OK. So normally on a cow, you'll have about 20% of milk which is in the gland cistern, and about 80% which is alveolar milk, OK?

This alvellar milk will only leave. To the gland cistern, if there is oxytocin circulating, OK, so what you need to do is you need to stimulate the cow in a way, wait for a few, OK, maybe in 60 seconds and then there will be a milk letdown. So bimodality occurs when there is delayed ejection of this alvellar milk, OK?

So, it gives you a curve of the milk flow curve, which is bimodal, OK, so you have two high points, OK. This, of course, slows milking because for a minute or so, there's no milk coming out and also because If there's no milk coming out, the vacuum, is, is higher, the, the, the, the vacuum level is higher, and that tends to lead to T10 hyperkeratosis as well as being a discomfort feeling for the cow as well. OK.

For fortunately, we have nowadays, you know, most milking parlour, . You know, makes, have, ways of, of checking this. OK.

So for example, you can have an individual cow and you can check every milking, how was the, the milk flow curve for that cow, and you have that one was a normal flow and this is obviously a bimodal milk flow, OK. And after the milking, you can check, you know, what kind of percentage of bimodality you had at the end of that milking, OK? And normally what I try to aim for is to be under 20% of, of bimodality percentage, OK.

So we have some farms that are below 10, some are nearly 80%, so. We, we see a range of, of, of, of values. What I want to is preferably to be under 20%, to be, you know, more or less OK.

OK. So you can, you can do that through your, through your milking parlour if, if it has that possibility, but also you can use some equipment, OK. There is the lactocorder.

And the vadia, we don't have the lactocor that we do have a couple of wadias in our, in our practise. We just leave them on for the whole of the milking, and then we use them to check the proportion of bimodality, which corresponds to this section, and also to adjust the automatic cluster remover so that we don't have a lot of over milking at the end of milking. OK, so it's very, it's a very good tool, very informative tool for us and for, for them.

And for the, for the, for the farmer, OK? Another, another good monitoring tool is, is the graphic representation of milking that most milking parlour producers have on their softwares. OK.

So this is the gea, but I mean if it's Delaal or if it's I don't know, African, it will be more or less the same. They will all have the possibility for you to check these, OK? So this is an individual milking, this is, this is 20 cows here, it would show 20 cows below, so 2 times 20.

And here you see the cow entering the parlour. OK, these are the cows going into the parlour, and here the cow being the, the, the clusters being attached to the cow. OK.

And then here is the, the, the detachments of the milking units at the end of milking, OK? And if you click on any of these, you'll actually show down to the second at what time that occurred. And this is quite a useful tool for us to see what actually is going on, OK?

Especially in milkings where you're not around. So for example, here you see that You know, there's no actual, not actually a good routine. There's no routine because they, they, they do things differently, whenever the a full set of 20 cows comes into the parlour, they, they, they, they do things slightly different.

So this one is different from this one, for example, OK? And this one is different from this one again, OK? So you see that they're not actually having a routine as such, OK.

Another interesting thing here is that The last cow that entered in this line was immediately start, the milker started pretty much immediately, you put the cluster cluster on the cow. For example, here, you see the same thing. OK, so you can actually check the number of seconds between the cow entering and the the attachment of the milking you.

So if it's too immediate, you know that they're not preparing the cow, OK? Another thing is that, you know, this, this is more or less the same as the guy was doing before. So the cow enters the parlour and he starts at the very end to, to, to milk the cow, OK, at the end of the tent, not at the beginning, but at the end.

So you can see a lot of things with this graphic representation of milking, which is available in most softwares or software management for the, for the, for the, for the milking part, OK? So. Yeah.

Sure. There is something wrong? OK.

Yeah, one question was, you, you talk or you give some name, but, yeah, can you rereize the software that could help to, to have this? Well, these are the softwares that are linked to a particular, you know, producer of, of a milking parlour. So the Gaia, the gea will be the, the, the dairy plant, the, the, the delaval will be the.

I forget the name, sorry. So they all, they all have the software linked to the milking parlour. If if there is, if it's a fairly, fairly recent milking parlour, they will have all these possibilities, OK?

So. Outro or, you know, these will all have the possibility more or less, it might show up differently, graphic in terms of graphic presentation, but they will all give, and, and if you don't know how to get them, well, if you contact the, the technician. In your area they probably will be able to help you see if, if, if you can get these easily or not, OK?

OK. What, what can actually, what, what can you actually check? OK, you can look at the bimodal milking percentage.

What time the milking started, the, the, the, the, the farmers, you know, my clients normally take a good look at, especially in the night milking, we have fairly large sized farms in, in where I work and there's, there are more farms doing 3 milkings a day, so the night milking. It might be an issue. They don't actually know what time it starts and if things are going well.

So the simple thing is the time that milking started, the duration of milking and the quantity of milk per unit of time to get an idea of the efficiency with which they are, the milkers are removing the milk. And milking events. So for example, the too short time between cows entering a detachment, like I said, preparation of the cows different from the recommended routine and the manual versus automatic cluster removal.

So, so they might have an automatic cluster removal, but they might choose to put it on manual for some reason. Some, some milkers like to put them in manual for for most cows without actually having a reason for doing it, OK? I think we should be training milkers a lot because that improves, improves the compliance of what you are recommending and what the farmer or the farm manager is recommending to them, OK?

So, who should be training the milkers? I think it's a good idea that it's someone from outside the farm because that becomes an instant specialist. It might be someone that actually doesn't know.

So much more than you, but actually just because it's someone from outside the farm that they don't know they don't know from everyday that becomes, you know, an instant specialist almost, OK. I think in the training, you should go over things they should do and explain why they should do it. I think quite often, they don't really know, nobody explained to them why they should be doing things in a certain way.

OK, they just were told, OK, do this like this, and that's it. I think it helps for them to understand the reasons why things should be performed in a certain fashion, OK? Always have the farm manager presence because that generates interesting discussions.

So, so that has, I think, in two ways. One, the farm manager may himself realise that there is one very good reason why they they're doing things in a certain way. OK.

There might be a valid reason why they're doing things in a certain way. OK, so that needs to be sorted. And also it gives the farm manager to, you know, to touch on points or reinforce the points that I'm making and say, OK, we have a problem with this person that does this, so we need to sort that out.

You see, this is, this is how you should be doing, OK? And, and it should improve, hopefully communication and compliance with, with with with the milkers, OK? I think a very good example of, of, of the power of training comes from, from McDonald's.

If you go into McDonald's, pretty much anywhere in the world, you can get the same food being prepared, probably without any public health concerns, and I would say, I would risk to say that. That the McDonald's does not have the best employees around, OK, so normally they might be quite young, they might be, you know, quite the opposite, they might be quite old, maybe not very educated or something, but, you know, they get the job done without any problems. OK, so training I think is very important, and, and, and should be implemented largely on on farms as well.

I think also there is a role for for incentives to be given to to milkers, OK? It might be, they might be actually detrimental if you don't know how to do it, . But I think if you do it in a good way, it might have good, it might yield good results, OK?

You might need to work with teams, so normally milkers are working as as a pair, for example, and might not be able to do it for individuals, but you might. I don't know. One example that we have working Is, is an individual incentive, financial incentive given to, to, to milkers, and that incentive is, is composed of 20% if the if the milker doesn't miss the day of work, 40% if it goes over a certain Quantity of milk per cow per milking, OK, so to ensure that the cows are milked completely, and another 40% for fulfilling a certain milking routine.

OK, looking at, for example, the proportion of of bimodal milk milk flow, or for example, such a thing as looking at the philtres and the milking parlour to see how dirty they are, things like that. Yes. Yes, one question is, how often do you recommend to train the milker monthly, quarterly, and what is your general recommendation?

Well, it, it depends. If, if I'm starting to work on the farm, it might be monthly in the beginning, and then every 3 months and even every 6 months. It depends on the amount of work that needs to be done.

Normally the farmer, after I've done the first two starts asking for other things. So, you know, talking about cows, talking about, a very popular one I do is, is, is how to move cows, you know, without using their senses, you know, it's it's apparently something very Simple, but not a lot of people give, give it much thought and, and it's, it's become increasingly popular. So, so, you know, quick answer is in the beginning, probably in the first approach to the farm, probably every month and then every 3 months, every 6 months, as things get improving, OK.

The, the thing is, sometimes these farms will have a lot of rotation of staff. So whenever you feel it is necessary to do, do it again, because, you know, there's 2 or 3 new guys in the milking, you should probably do it again. OK.

OK. So if, if you're doing the, the, the incentives for the milkers, again, there is the potential to use the key performance indicator to base your incentive system in, OK, and that might not, might be not just for the, for the milk quality, OK, it might be for, for other aspects as well. So, for example, one of the farms.

One of our clients again, he does, if he gets an incentive for, for everybody on his staff. If both tank somatic cell counts, stays below a certain value for 3 months, OK? And he does every 3 months, they might get a financial incentive and there's one separate for, for, for somatic cell, one for fertility, and one for calf survival as well, OK?

So that's another way of, of possibly using it. OK, so, again, I think some of you will be familiar, hopefully with the, with the technical manual of the target 150 in which we, we define these key performance indicators that you might be basing your your Incentive on, OK? I don't think it's good to use clinical mastitis rates as an indicator for incentives because that you could have either overdiagnosing or under-diagnosing, OK.

So you would not be looking at the real situation. And that might be detrimental to the farm. It's the same, it's the same if, if you're using, sometimes you, you, you hear about this, a farmer or a farm manager using an incentive for detected heats.

OK, so you'll increase the number of detected heats, but actually, a lot of them will not be heats at all. OK, so it it it it's In the end, detrimental to the farm. So, OK, so probably not a very good way if you're going to use the clinical mastitis rate.

Again, if you do choose to look at the clinical mastitis rate for, for some other reason, I think you should probably consult the target 150 manual because again, all these KPIs and and and and others regarding not just mastitis and no quality but other. Fertility and, and, and. Welfare and nutrition as well are explained there, OK?

So in conclusion, I think mastitis is, is probably on most farms the most costly disease, you have, and that's even without considering the hidden costs of mastitis that we've, we've talked about today. So decreased fertility, potential to increase transmission of infectious diseases, and potential to increase the antimicrobial resistance, OK? I think we should train milkers routinely to increase compliance with the milking routines, and we should monitor them, monitor their performance, closely but remotely, and there might be a way of, of linking these to incentives that might further increase the compliance.

And I think we should never forget feeding as an important risk factor for the immune response, but again, it's, it's, it's a very, it's a very difficult area to, to, to, to try to have good correlations between what's, you know, what's measurable in terms of immune confidence because we don't, we don't actually see, we don't have a tool to do it, but never forget to look. At the feeding, if you have something that seems like an immune problem, OK. Thank you very much for for your attention.

And I would like to pass pass the word tore to Yeah, thank you very much. Yes, Ricardo. Yes, so it's time, if you still have some questions you want to be addressed, it's now.

If not, I will, wish you a very good evening, and you will receive the reply after all. And if you're also interested in having the target 150 manual, you can also ask your local contact to send you the the PDF, I guess, the moment I don't see any new question. Yeah, so that's it for me.

Good for you. Thanks to all who have been with us tonight, and yes, I hope to see you also in the end of June for the 2nd episode. Bye-bye.