Today was a very exciting day for me at the barn because I recently purchased a gift for myself and it arrived this weekend. I bought a set of nutrient agar petri plates and I will be conducting a project on the cleanliness by swabbing four separate locations on the farm and plating the results!
That was the simplified version of my plan, but now if you are interested in more detail I will discuss below. First I will only be swabbing four separate locations on the facility due to their importance in association to the calves so that would mean samples collected from a unit in the milking parlor will be excluded... perhaps in the future if this goes well I can attempt more! As for now, the four locations I have determined to test will be the inside of a bottle used to feed the calves (1), the interior part of a nipple attachment for the bottles (2), a swab of a container that holds the colostrum (3), and finally a swab of the inside of a bucket that calves drink milk out of (4). Each object I swab will be allocated two nutrient agar petri plates and two plates will be set aside to act as a control. Since it is already hypothesized by myself that each location will likely sustain a significant portion of bacterial cultures I want to perform serial dilutions. All this will do is dilute the sample to a readable amount and with some simple calculations I can interpret the data and provide an estimate to the number of colonies present at that location. If I did not do this I pose a risk of growing too many colonies on my petri plates which would make counting them impossible. For the purposes of my experiment I will dilute my samples to in a 1:10 ratio by first fully incorporating my swab with 2ml of distilled water (this creates my stock solution of bacteria) and preparing three test tubes with 9ml of distilled water each. Then I will take 1ml of my bacterial mixture and add it to the first of three test tubes. Afterwards I will extract 1ml from the first test tube, dispense it into the second and repeat this process one last time for the third test tube. My final steps will be to collect a final swab of the third test tube and plate it on two petri plates. Since there are four locations and each is assigned two petri plates this means that I will have eight plates that should show signs of bacterial growth and two additional plates as my control group with no bacterial growth. Ideally there will be minimal or zero growth on the petri plates as these are cleaned twice daily and come in direct contact with our newest members of the farm.
Below are several pictures of myself running this experiment!
There was a new heifer calf born this morning.
Today we shipped 4,731 gallons of milk.
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