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SOMATIC CELL COUNT IMPACTS EVERYTHING Mike Lormore, DVM, MS, MBA, Director Cattle Technical Services, Zoetis
Today’s dairy industry is challenging. It takes business sense, strong instincts, dairy know-how, innovation and continuous improvement to succeed. Labor, health management, reproductive efficiencies and genetics are just a short, but critical, list of things that demand your attention and offer tremendous opportunities for improvement. What if you could prioritize the items that will have the greatest impact on your profitability? To help you do just that, Zoetis and Compeer Financial analyzed 14 years of herd data from 702 year-end financial and production record summaries,1 resulting in 10 factors that drive profitability on a dairy. Management of these factors will have the biggest impact on your bottom line. The study identified that one driver of net farm income is the impact of bulk tank somatic cell count (BTSCC), as it is an indicator of overall performance, management and animal husbandry. Elevated BTSCC was associated with lower milk production, reduced pregnancy rates and greater death losses, according to the study. Somatic Cell Count (SCC) touches nearly every part of your dairy. Its wide-ranging impact on your operation means lowering BTSCC provides an excellent opportunity to increase profit.
Is 100,000 BTSCC even possible? Based on the previously mentioned results, aggressively managing SCC to push levels below 200,000 can help drive profitability on your dairy. The key to keeping SCC levels in check is through a proactive and thorough monitoring program, preventing new infections in the dry period, and reducing your overall risk of mastitis. Continue reading on page 6.
The low-SCC profit opportunity The best performing one-third of herds in our study had a BTSCC average of 125,000 cells/mL. Meanwhile, the bottom-third of herds had a BTSCC average of 269,000 cells/mL. This difference in SCC was associated with an 11-pound difference in milk per cow per day, and a $0.64/cwt difference in net farm income per cwt.1 While there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the SCC averages of top- and bottomperforming herds, there were large differences in productivity and profitability. In the study, 6.1 pounds per cow per day was lost with every 100,000-cell increase in BTSCC. Knowing this, the long-term impact of somatic cell counts at the accepted standard of 200,000 can be very expensive. Producers and their farm advisory teams must be challenging themselves to set a lower goal to reduce SCC to 150,000 or even 100,000.
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