Post by lindseyryan on Nov 8, 2010 15:42:33 GMT -5
Hey everyone, thanks a bunch for maintaining this forum. I've only had my cow, Cher for about two and a half months now, but in that amount of time, this site has proven invaluable in answering my many, many questions. This may not qualify as a full-fledged cow emergency, but I thought it would be best to get help as soon as possible. Starting yesterday evening, Cher's milk stopped passing smoothly through the filter and this morning, stopped being filterable at all, by which I mean a new filter allowed maybe a quarter cup of milk to pass before clogging with a yellowish, creamy film; not flaky or globby, but smooth. After I experienced difficulty filtering the milk I did a somatic cell content test with a california mastitis test. I only tested the milk as a whole, not from separate quarters, but the milk gelled up pretty quickly, and from what I can tell, certainly has a high somatic cell count. Cher is an older Jersey, she's ten now, and spent most of her life on an organic valley farm in Oregon, and came to me from some friends in Eugene who do raw dairy up there. She was visited by a vet before I got her and received a clean bill of health as well as a negative brucellosis and tb test. Since arrival here, in Petrolia, CA she seems to be doing well. She varied a little in milk production levels, but recently we started getting a pretty tasty looking combination of alfalfa and orchard grass hay that seems to have brought production up to around 11 quarts per day. I milk her twice a day, but not on a twelve hour schedule, rather at 7am and 5pm to try to do it during the daylight hours, once we started on that schedule, she started milking a little more in the morning, and less at night. During milking times I feed a little of the nice hay, some of the hay from here, which is just a mixed grass hay, and about a quart sized scoop of a dairy grain ration, that is mostly corn and wheat. I also add a little scoop, maybe a quarter cup of a dairy mineral mix. After milking she gets more hay. My milking procedure is as follows: I start with a clean hot soapy rag and wash first the teats and then the whole udder, I pay pretty good attention to the opening of the teat making sure it gets clean. After that I use a clean rag with just water, no soap to rinse the teats and then the udder. I try to milk very thoroughly and then dip her teats in an iodine solution when I'm done. So my question is what to do now, does my cow have mastitis, and if so, how do I know what kind? if she does, and even if she doesn't what should I do? I know that there is a wealth of info on this site, but it would take me a long time to wade through it, and I'm worried about Cher, so I thought I would ask for help in the meantime so I can get started making her feel better. From my limited reading so far, I'm thinking about lowering her grain ration and bringing more hot water with when I milk and maybe some peppermint or cayenne oil for after milking. I am about to go milk again and do a mastitis test on the individual quarters to see if there is any difference. Please let me know what I should do to get the ball rolling. Thanks so much for all your help.
Ryan
Ryan
