The Moos Room™

[music]
[cow moos]
Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. The OG three is here, Brad, Emily, and myself. We are recording a couple days before Thanksgiving. I am hosting a bunch of people at my house, not sure if I'm looking forward to it or not. What are you up to, Emily, for Thanksgiving?
Emily: Like I do anything. I celebrate big, so it's a multi-day affair. I'll be with my dad's side of the family on Thursday, and then I also have Thanksgiving festivities on Friday and Saturday as well.
Joe: Nice.
Emily: I will be making a Turkey.
Joe: You're making the Turkey. That's a lot of responsibility.
Emily: I'm up for the challenge.
Joe: We'll have to update everybody on how it goes. Bradley, what are you going to do?
Bradley: Nice that you guys are partying and having Turkey and everything like that. I'll be feeding calves. I'll be feeding my research calves all week. All my undergrads are going home. Everybody's ditching me, so the boss has to take control and do the work, so feeding calves.
Joe: Everybody can think about Bradley when it's 20 degrees on Thursday.
Emily: Play a little violin solo for him.
Bradley: You don't have to feel sorry for me. I'm actually looking forward to it. It's been a while since I've had the opportunity to just feed calves alone.
Emily: Farm in solitude.
Bradley: That's right. There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that.
Joe: Since I became a dad, I have a whole new appreciation of just silence. It's a wonderful thing sometimes. I might be looking forward to that, too. Let's quit screwing around and get into the topic today. Emily, as promised, is the star of the show today, the Emily Show also known as The Moos Room. Today, we are talking about milking procedure. There's been a couple articles popping up in popular press about timing the milking procedure and how important it is. We figured we'd better review it and there's no one better to do that than Emily here.
Emily: Too kind, Joe.
[laughter]
Joe: As we move into this, the timing is important. I used to do this in practice. I'd sit there with a stopwatch and record things. It can vary quite a bit from dairy to dairy. Emily, tell me why this is so important to get these things right.
Emily: I want to say I've spent a lot of time in parlors with stopwatches too, and there is probably nothing that milkers hate more than that, somebody in their way with a stopwatch. The milking procedure and timing it out right is something that I've always had a lot of interest in, and I'm sure I'll do it more than once this episode but have to shout out Dr. Jeff Reneau, really a big player in mastitis management and somatic cell count reduction and all of that, and practices in the parlor as well.
The reason that timing the milking just right in the parlor, there's a lot of things. The biggest goal is that-- well, two big goals. As Jeff Reneau would say, you want to milk clean, dry, well-stimulated teats, and that's something that's going to take a little bit of time. Then, also you want to be maximizing your milk production. That really ties into the first one too, with just making sure that cows are properly prepped for optimal letdown and that they're clean. That's really what we're looking for here.
Joe: The big thing is that if we do one of these pieces wrong, the whole thing falls apart. It's a chain, it's a domino effect and especially good stimulation becomes important for making sure that we're not milking an udder that doesn't have milk there to milk yet. That could cause some teat damage, that can cause all sorts of different things that we don't want, and can lead to mastitis.
Emily: I can guarantee all three of us have heard this, and that is farmers will go, "Oh, as soon as I turn the milk pump on, they're just dripping milk." We don't do a lot of stimulation. They know when the milk pump turns on. I think that that helps. That's auditory stimulation that can also help with milk letdown. Turning on your milk pump is not a replacement for stripping teats and massaging the udder. It is not a replacement for it.
If that's your milk letdown plan, we need to think about adding a little more meat to that just to make it effective and safer for the cow, too, because if they have a machine on them and they're not letting anything down, then we get into damaged teat ends, damaged teats themselves, a whole host of problems.
Joe: That's the essence of it is it causes a lot of problems and it's going to actually make for more time later that you spend treating cows and mess around with cows that have problems, then if you just try to do these things right from the get-go. Let's get into the actual procedure. What do we do first?
Emily: Now, as far as procedure, I think every farm does it a little differently, and I'm not here to promote one way or another. My big thing is that you are just getting all the times of these different things in. I've milked cows for my brother, so I'm just going to use what we do when we're milking there as an example. Again, this is not the right or wrong way to do it. This is just the one that's freshest in my mind and the one I have the muscle memory for.
That is, once cows get in the parlor, then they get an initial wipe down with a rag. Then they get a teat dip, and then they'll get stripped, and then they get one more wipe with a new clean rag. We use cloth rags. Then milking machine gets attached. We do wipe, dip, strip, wipe, attach.
Joe: It can vary from farm to farm, and whatever you do, as long as you end up, like Emily said, with a clean, dry, well-stimulated teat to milk, it doesn't really matter too much but the order can affect the timing of everything. You just have to work that out for your parlor, your setup, however you're doing it.
Emily: I like to go through the times of these different tasks from shortest to longest, and then you can see how they can plug into each other. You can definitely find what works best for you. I know, especially in parlor situations, to help get the timing right and space it out, they might be prepping four cows and then they go and attach. Just finding out what's going to work in your parlor or if you're milking in tie stalls, too, how does that look to make sure that you're still getting that right prep-lag time.
Prep-lag time is really, that's the full amount of time from initial stimulation or contact with the udder, with the teats, to when the milking machine is attached. Before we talk about how long that is, I'm going to start with stimulation. I'm actually going to do this as a quiz for Bradley. Bradley, no cheating. Stimulation time, when we're talking about the teat skin surface, getting stimulated, from wiping, cleaning, stripping, what have you, how many seconds do you think we need for optimal letdown?
Bradley: 10.
Emily: 10 to 20 seconds.
Bradley: I'm not looking either.
Emily: I can't confirm that, but it seemed like you were really thinking on it. Yes, 10 to 20 seconds, and again, that is how long you want to be stimulating the teat skin surface. Things like wiping are included in that. Stripping is included in that. Again, really making sure that you are getting in there and really helping to stimulate that oxytocin for milk let-down.
Bradley: It was a pretty educated guess. Want to know how I got that? Here we go. Brad's got sensors. Brad's got sensors.
Emily: Oh, geez.
Bradley: Some milking parlors have auto stimulation, so I have the auto stimulator set for 10 seconds. Our milkers stimulate the teats automatically for 10 seconds beforehand. We're still trying to do a manual stimulation, but then I also have an auto stimulator to provide some extra stimulation maybe of changes in milkers or different things like that. You can at least get some consistent stimulation with the milking machine when it's on auto stimulate. Fun fact.
Emily: Very interesting. Thanks for sharing that, Bradley. Although, I will say I'm really a fan for stripping each teat, because that also gives you the opportunity to visually examine the milk for any sign of mastitis, clumps, watery, bloody, anything like that. I think, like you said, Bradley, adding in that machine stimulation just for a little extra, the recommended time is 10 to 20 seconds, but if your process is 25 or 30 seconds, I think that that's fine, too. You don't need to be simulating teats for a minute, but 10 to 20 seconds, give or take a little, on the back end I think is fine.
Bradley: I think if you're not sure, you could always go a little bit longer because we always tend to maybe under-stimulate as well. That probably causes more problems.
Emily: Certainly does. Now, the teats are stimulated. Bradley, your next question, how long does teat dip need to be on the teat?
Bradley: 20 seconds.
Emily: Is that your final answer?
Bradley: That is my answer. It may not be right.
Emily: [mimicks alarm] It's wrong. You were close. It's 30 seconds.
Bradley: 30 seconds.
Emily: 30 seconds contact time. That is getting the teat dip on there and allowing it enough time to clean bacteria off of that teat skin surface. I like to remind people, too, that before you dip, make sure that there's no visible debris or residue. They get the little manure chunks or little hunks of dirt or there's some shavings or straw or something in there. Get all that brushed away just to make sure that the teat dip is in fact coming into full contact with the full teat skin surface there.
You don't want to do it too quickly. It can be easy to miss a teat having complete coverage. I know my brother gets a little angry with me when I milk for him because I go through a lot of teat dip because that entire teat is going to be covered. Then also in post-dip we use iodine, I go through a lot, but I know that those cows are clean. We want to leave that on for 30 seconds. 20 seconds is a little short. This is another one, too, where if it goes a little over or you are timing it out and you're like, "It's actually 35 seconds, 40 seconds," that's okay because it's cleaning.
Leaving it on there a little bit longer, 10 more seconds is not going to be any sort of a detriment.
Joe: One of the things that I see when I'm being super annoying and bothering the milkers at the parlor is that we miss the teat end quite a bit when we're wiping that teat dip off. What I see is that if you don't--
Emily: The end like the tip or the end where it attaches to the udder?
Joe: No, the end like the tip of the teat, and because it has that sphincter there, there's lots of folds and little crevices at the end and that's where a lot of dirt and everything else can sit and get missed when you wipe. One of the things that I really harp on is getting a pinching motion on the very tip of that teat to catch that and you can see that in the parlor.
If people aren't doing that and really paying attention to it, you can go by with a piece of gauze and just wiped into that teat and catch a lot of grit and nastiness that's left behind. Just one of my soapbox things when I'm being annoying in a parlor.
Emily: That's a great point, Joe. Those little quick swab tests just using a piece of gauze or paper towel, whatever you have on hand, is a great way to check. You can also use that for checking teat dip coverage, too. Have somebody dip a teat and then if you take a paper towel, wrap it around the teat, hold it there for a second, take it off, it should be one full singular blot of teat dip. If it's not, then the coverage isn't good.
The contact time with teat dip is very, very important. You need to make sure that you are setting everything up for effective contact time.
Joe: You've basically prepped the teat, you're going to wipe it again. Then you've got a little bit of time, it seems like, because if you have that contact time on there for 30 seconds and you're not wanting to put that milker on until at the bare minimum 60 seconds from your initial touching, you've got some time to kill, it seems like. Is that just prepping other cows as we move along?
Emily: Yes, most often. Like I said earlier on, it seems like in most parlors the standard is four, but it also depends on the size of the parlor, how many you have on each side. If you're doing that for about four cows, then by the time you get back to the first one, so you're going to go through and wipe them all. Then you're going to go through and dip them all. Then you're going through and stripping them all. Then you're going through and giving them another wipe.
By the time you get back to cow one to attach the milking machine, the goal for prep-lag time, so the total time this takes is one minute to two minutes. I like to see things a little closer on the one-minute side. Just for parlor efficiency, too, we all have our goals. We want X turns per hour out of this parlor. That's something that contributes to it. You may also find there are certain cows that need just a little more time to let down their milk or you can figure out how you want to have that timed out, but yes, absolutely.
You don't want to get the machine on too soon. That's why we recommend prepping multiple cows at once because as you're finishing up with your last cow, your first cow is ready and has been standing there for about a minute or two.
Joe: I'd love to be close to one minute if we can get parlor efficiency where it needs to be and just get cows through. The problem is that you've got to focus on that stimulation phase, because if you don't do that well enough and then cows don't have milk there for the milker to milk, then you actually are causing more time to be wasted because now your milker's doing the stimulation, you've got to wait for that time and then you end up basically with what's called bimodal let-down or bimodal milking, which is what's been covered in the popular press lately and why we're doing this episode.
That's an issue, because there is some milk there, but not very much. Most of that milk is still up in the udder, in the glandular part of the udder. If you don't stimulate enough, then that cow doesn't drop that milk all right away and you end up with a bunch of milk coming right away that was just there in the base or in the bottom of the udder. Then you have a big lag time where you don't see much milk because your milker is now actually doing the stimulation, waiting for the rest of the oxytocin to release and let everything down.
That's a bad deal. All sorts of complications from that, damaging to the teat end, milk still left in the udder, which is a big one. That's where we talk about, how Emily was talking about productivity that's lost and then also increase the mastitis and infections.
Emily: Thanks for bringing that up, Joe. I think, too, whenever somebody says efficiency, a lot of people associate that with speed, and that's not the case. Efficiency is about doing things right and in a smooth pattern that you can just repeat over and over. To me, that's efficiency. Even if it's something that's taking two hours, if you're doing it in a way that the process is always moving forward, then it's efficient. That's how I view this.
When we talk about efficient milking or efficient parlors, it's not necessarily the parlor that preps cows the fastest or that has the most turns per hour. Those may be good benchmarks for checking on how your parlor is managed. We really want to make sure that we are giving cows one to two minutes to really fully get that milk down to make sure that teat skin surface is completely clean. That's going to make the most efficient parlor.
It will help make things go faster, too, especially if you're not waiting for cows due to the bimodal let-down.
Joe: Just to put a number on it so people can have an idea of what we're talking about production-wise, basically what we're looking at is for every minute that that milker on udder that's not been properly stimulated, we're talking about seven pounds of milk per day, and that's a lot of milk and you don't want to be losing out on that from production standpoint. Then, like we talked about, all the other complications that can happen because of that.
Emily: I would be remiss if I didn't say that a lot of this comes down to training. Especially if you are milking in a parlor, it's quite likely you have employees doing that. I know that we can't control what other people do. I would just really stress the point that you need to be training the same procedure for everybody, finding a way to make sure that is just, "This is how we do it here, and we don't take shortcuts and we don't do it any other way."
Having the milking procedure written out clearly and posted up on the parlor wall, or I've seen some really great ones where it's just pictures. It's not even words. Especially, if you have employees that English isn't their first language or they speak some other language other than English, they can just have that visual reminder like, "First, I wipe and then second I'm going to do this. Then I do that, just with simple icons or pictures," can be a really useful way to try to keep everybody on the same page with that, because that's definitely something that I've heard a lot out in the field of like, "Yes, we just have a few milkers that aren't doing it this way, and that may be habits they've brought in from past jobs at other farms, or they think they have a better way or a better idea."
Just make sure that if you do have employed milkers, that you're checking in with them regularly, making sure they're following the procedure. If your employees have ideas, too, for how to change the milking procedure, as long as you're within that one- to two-minute prep-lag time and you're getting enough contact time and stimulation time and all of that, hear out their ideas, too.
Joe: A lot of this is coming down to employee buy-in and if you can get them to buy into it, I find that explaining the why behind a lot of these things, and that if we do this correctly, especially spending the time upfront stimulating that teat correctly, will save them time in the long run. That is a big motivator as well. Parlor size is a huge piece of this. A lot of dairies have outgrown their parlor, and they have to be fast in the parlor. Like Emily said, I don't like frantic parlors. I think that is the recipe for disaster when it comes to a milk prep. We want nice, smooth, calm, efficient parlors. Frantic parlors where people are just running to try to keep up, that's a recipe for disaster.
When we talk about that much milk on the table, seven pounds of milk for every minute that we're milking a teat that's not properly stimulated, a parlor can-- and additions or improvements to a parlor can pay for themselves very quickly. It also improves your employee retention, because I don't know a whole lot of people that can milk in a frantic fast-paced way for 8 to 12 hours every day, over and over and over again. You just burn through people pretty quickly. Keep that in mind. There's a lot of benefits to having your parlor the correct size for your dairy.
Emily: You just gave me a really great visual there, Joe. I think my next article, I'm going to title it, "Is your parlor more like a three-ring circus?" [laughs] I appreciate that.
Joe: Yes. I think we've all seen that. Like I said, there's multiple effects. Employee retention, with the labor issues in the industry, is a big piece of it. It's a hard job, it's a tough job to do every day, and the more comfortable and easy that job can be, the better time you're going have keeping employees around.
Emily: Yes. You don't want to create that really high-stress situation for employees and high-stress situation for your cows, too.
Joe: We haven't covered what happens after the milker comes off. If we do everything right on the front end, we've still got to do everything right on the backside. What do I do when the milkercomes off?
Emily: Milker is going to come off, and then hopefully, in your parlor or barn you're using a post-dip. Iodine is a really common one. That's just like with your pre-dip, when you're prepping cows, you have got to make sure you're getting really good coverage. That's when, too, that you aren't going to wipe off, you're going to leave it on there. Making sure they have good coverage, and the most important thing, too, is you want to keep your cows standing for at least 30 minutes. As Joe already mentioned, what we're doing when we're working on milk let-down and the oxytocin release is the teat has a sphincter at the end.
We're wanting that sphincter to relax so that the milk can flow out more easily. Once that sphincter is relaxed, it stays relaxed for a while. 30 minutes, it takes for the sphincter to re-close after milking. That's why we want to make sure that we're keeping those cows standing, because if they're laying down, those sphincters are open. It's just an invitation to bacteria. In addition to that, too, like I said, we leave the post-dip on the teats. That needs a little time to dry too, because of course, especially if you use something like shavings for bedding, if they're laying down on that with wet teats, then they're going to have teats covered in shavings, and then that's going to be a big mess you have to deal with next time they come in for milking.
We really focus on having water available to your cows right away so they can stand up and drink for a while, aligning feeding time, or at the very least pushing feed up after cows get milked, just to encourage them to eat and that keeps them standing for that 30 minutes. That's a really important thing to do.
Joe: Box time for Joe, again, I know you guys are so excited. The return alley is one of my big things that I look at when I'm talking about parlor management because that sphincter is open when they come out of the parlor. If they're splashing through everything and there's manure getting splashed up into the front legs, you know it's getting splashed back onto the udder as well. I think that you have to be paying attention to that. You don't want standing water or manure in that return alley. It needs to be very clean so that we can protect that teat while it's still open. That's all.
Emily: Yes. Yes, Joe, you're very, very right. One little number I have here for you. They estimate that up to 50% of new contagious mastitis infections could be prevented by just a really good clean post-milking procedure. Getting those teats completely dipped, letting that dip stay on there for 30 minutes, keeping them standing for 30 minutes, all of those things can make a huge impact in preventing new infections especially.
Joe: That's plenty to think about. There's a lot going on there.
Emily: Lots to ruminate on.
Joe: Lots to ruminate on.
Emily: [laughs].
Joe: There is an article that matches some of the things that we're talking about today, and I will make sure that's in the show notes. With that, we'll wrap it up. Emily's got our plugs.
Emily: If you have questions, comments, or scathing rebuttals to today's episode, you can send us an email at themoosroom@umn.edu.
Joe: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Emily: For more information about milking procedure and all sorts of dairy and beef management, you can visit our website extension.umn.edu. You can also find us on Twitter @UMNMoosroom and @UMNFarmsafety. That's all I got. Let me say something. [unintelligible 00:25:59] Potpourri. [mumbles] [laughs] Come on, Bradley. Let's hear it.
Bradley: Potpouri.
Emily: Hey, Bradley. Say 'antibiotics'.
Bradley: Antibiotics.
Emily: Yes.
Joe: Antibiotics.
Emily: Antibiotics. [laughs]
Joe: At least, outside working [unintelligible 00:26:19] comes in sweating and sits down to just be--
Emily: Harassed.
Joe: Harassed.
[laughter]
[cow moos]
[music]
[00:26:28] [END OF AUDIO]

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