Mega chunky milk out of nowhere!!!!

[njsparks]

Cookie cow has been fresh for 4 months and her milk has been amazing. We battled with mastitis last year and I dried her up with Tomorrow. Since calving this time - we have been mastitis free until now - maybe... Yesterday morning I went out to milk and she had her usual two quarters full of milk - the other two had been drained by the calf for breakfast. I milked out the back quarter and as usual it looked GREAT... I went up to the left front quarter which milked out great the night before and that morning it was chuck full of slimy lumps. Every squirt was riddled with chunks to the point where the entire top of the milk bucket was a mass of floating chunks. They were very yellow and I could scoop up a handful of them... I milked her empty, massaged, milked out the last little bit and got a few more chunks. That same day - for the evening milking I hit her with 7,000 mg of vitamin c - 1,000 iu of vitamin e and the chunks were significantly less even before the vitamins were in her gut (so they aren't the reason that I had less chunks) - The next morning there were almost NO chunks and her milk was white and wonderful again.

No heat, no swelling, no smell to the milk - no tenderness - her bag is soft and squeezable when I finish milking... so I'm sitting here scratching my head... was it mastitis or did she just hold up for the calf too long and had a good release finally??? I'm super perplexed. I did not test for mastitis using the cmt because it will only tell me if there are elevated SCC... but I can and likely will tonight.

Have any of you had a milkout of chunky milk and then POOF - back to normal in two milkings??

[Shelby]

that's odd really, you didn't by chance have some really cold weather did you?

I've never seen yellow mastitis, so my guess would be that it was butter...

you said there was no hardness or swelling or heat or smell, did you taste it? Was it salty?

[Claire]

I've never seen the butter chunks come OUT of the udder in that form, they form when they are in the bucket. My cow does produce yellow chunks with mastitis, though.

Where they the typical slimy/mozzarella cheese like chunks of mastitis? Since she was totally fine otherwise I wonder if some pocket of nastiness way up in her udder finally let loose from her last lactation?

[njsparks]

Yes, we've had freaky weather here in Arizona... 45 degree days - close to zero or low teens at night so the cows don't know whether to shed or draw in more of a winter coat...

I didn't taste it because I couldn't get past the handful of chunkies... totally turned my stomach to think of swigging that down... and I butcher my own meat so it struck me funny... anyway... as of this morning - she was virtually chunk free and her entire udder was just as soft and squeezable as could be. No spots of hardness like would indicate a blocked duct... nothing like that... it was the weirdest thing. I'm keeping her on the vitamins for a few days to be sure, but so far I think it was a wacky fluke... the weirdest part was that we went down below zero over new years eve weekend and her milk did have a few butter globs but they were way different than this... this was almost like cheese curds just after you cut the curd...

[njsparks]

that's a possibility Claire... because it was like a bucket of floating cheese curds just after you cut the curt... not at all scrambled egg looking but almost shiny in the little miner lamp light that I wear to milk - seeing as how we're months away from milking in the daylight again... LOL

[Shelby]

Guess I missed the part where the chunks were coming out of the teat, I thought you meant you could see them in the bucket with that quarter, not see them as they were coming out..

[njsparks]

I could feel them as they flowed through the teat and watch them plop into the milk pail... and like I said, one milking was beautiful, the next was super chunk... the next was a few chunks and this morning - virtually no chunks... weirdest thing!

[parndt]

Bonnie does that too. She had it twice in a month. I realized I wasn't getting her teats clean enough, she had no reason to stand up after milking and I needed to use something after milking. Now, I make doubly sure every teat is shiny clean, I fluff her hay after milking so she thinks there's something new in it, and I put coconut oil and tea tree oil on after milking, making sure to get the ends (and the hole in the side :. It's been a couple months since her last episode.

[njsparks]

Thanks parndt!!! We have had horrible weather for Arizona these past couple of months... I've gone through 10 bales of straw just trying to keep dry bedding for the girls... snow, rain, snow, rain... MUCK!!! I've gone back to teat dipping after milking which I'd been kind of lax on... but I wash each teat with antibacterial soap in hot water (warm by the time I get every one penned up and the other critters fed) then rinse and dry before milking.. wash my hands really good (I had milk both girls twice daily - before and after work) and now I've added back in the after milking teat dipping - in hopes that that helps. They still have food to finish eating after I'm done milking so it's a good hour before they lay down for the night. I'll be sure to increase the bedding clean up intervals and get back to cleaning and dipping post milking... Sure don't want my cookie cow sick this year.. she's the best producer I've ever had!!!