I have an interesting update regarding the bacterial cleanliness study I conducted a few days ago and here are my results. To my surprise, there was a single bacterial growth on one petri plate! The petri plate with a single colony was the plate labeled nipple feeder two. This means that the sample I collected was from the interior of the nipple feeder and that this was the second of two plates assigned to this object. Now, this could be interpreted in several ways and these were my initial thoughts.
First, it is possible to consider that the current cleaning regime at the barn is doing wonderfully at controlling the microbial populations coming in direct contact with our calves. I purposefully swabbed objects that might expose our calves to germs so that we can we can see just how effective our current cleaning routine is. The other consideration I had was that there could have been some human error when I performed the collections/serial dilutions/plating... For now, I will plan on testing this again with a fresh round of petri plates! This time, I will attempt to swab the objects and directly transfer them to the petri plates to see if there is any bacterial growth at all, regardless if it is quantifiable. In the two photographs below they are the same petri plates, I just drew a red circle and arrow on the plate with the single bacterial colony to make it a bit easier to see.
Barn chores were simple, spent a considerable amount of time checking the health of the calves and recording temperatures of the youngest babies. I will begin outlining a new plan to perform a second series of bacterial cultures that will hopefully be run sometime within the next two weeks!
No new calves were born today.
Today we shipped 4,812 gallons of milk
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