Milk Testing

 Each month throughout the year we will have our milk tester come to the farm to collect valuable information. Today our milk tester came in for one of our milking shifts, as we milk our cows twice a day. When our milk tester is here, we will help them collect a small amount of milk from every cow, record the weight in pounds of milk produced from each cow, and determine the protein, butterfat, and SCC numbers. SCC stands for somatic cell count which is a measure of the immune cells and natural mammary cells in a portion of milk. Extremely high SCC could indicate an infection, such as mastitis. Mastitis is an infection of the mammary system and is very uncomfortable for the cow. It is incredibly important to monitor these values because the SCC average of the bulk tank that collects and holds all of our milk must be below a certain standard in order to be shipped and sold for human consumption. An interesting fact about cows is that they will not lactate if they are unhappy or scared. A cow must be producing oxytocin which is known in the dairy industry as the milk letdown hormone

I included a photograph of our milking parlor below. We have a sixteen by sixteen parlor, meaning we have thirty-two total milking units that can be used at the same time. Since we have a large farm it can take between five and six hours on average to milk all of our lactating cows! There are many different styles of parlors that farmers can have, such as a tie stall, rotary parlor, and robotic milker. Tie stall parlors will have the animal living in the same area where they get milked which is different from my farms design where we walk them to the milking parlor. A rotary will require the animals to walk to the parlor as well, but the cows will walk into a moving rotary. I highly recommend looking up a video for a rotary parlor, these are really cool and interesting to watch! Lastly a robotic milker will allow the cow to walk to the robotic milker at will and this machine can fully milk a cow without any human intervention. 

Today we shipped 5,446 gallons of milk and had one newborn bull calf.