Project Engage is in full swing, with the first round of visits completed. There has been some interesting results to date.

The programme has got Virtual Vet, a Co Waterford company, to measure all antibiotic usage on the farms for the last three years. They are also monitoring all antibiotic treatments and recording them.

This has allowed the vets to look where usage is occurring and also to regularly review treatments at each visit.

On-farm visits

The programme is designed for vets and farmers to engage in regular on-farm health visits. These look at a range of management and health issues that are at risk for that time of year.

The results to date show most farms using low amounts of antibiotics overall. Like everything, there is room for improvement.

We caught up with vet Ger Cusack as he took us through some learnings from his recent visits.

Farm visit - John Cummins, 14/11/19

Background

Cows housed most of the time. Still let out for a few hours, weather-permitting. Excellent shed, newly built when John converted from suckling to dairying about four years ago. There is a cubicle for every cow and sufficient feed space (2ft per cow or seven cows to the span) to enable all the cows to feed at the same time.

We decided to look closely at the silage results (including mineral content) at the next visit. Our practice saw quite a high incidence of milk fever last spring. Many of these were as a result of high K in the silage. High K can have a blocking effect on the uptake of Mg, thus increasing milk fever risk at calving.

Cow condition was, on the whole, very good. There were a number of cows that were over-conditioned. We discussed moving these cows into a 'fat club' on a diet of 50% silage and 50% barley straw. This should help move them to a body condition score (BCS) of 3.25 to 3.5 at calving, which would reduce the risk of conditions such as milk fever, mastitis and metritis post-calving. We also made sure these ladies on the restricted diet had adequate feeding space.

The cows were being dried off in small batches (a row at a time) to enable a good cleaning job to be done, followed by disinfection of the teat ends, to minimise the risk of introducing mastitis-causing bacteria during the process. Only cows that had one or more individual SCC counts in excess of 200,000, or an episode of mastitis in the current lactation, received an antibiotic dry cow tube.

Having had a discussion around the importance of critically important antibiotics in human medicine, John opted to use a dry cow tube that contained amoxycillin. This antibiotic is deemed to be less critically important for human use than a cephalosporin-type antibiotic.

We also discussed taking some blood samples to check the disease status of the herd in relation to salmonella, leptospirosis and IBR.

Watch in print and online over the coming months for updates from project engage.

Farm visit - Brian Cleary, 14/11/19

Farmer Brian Cleary, a participant in Project Engage.

Background

Cows housed full-time. Still milking cows, with very few dried off. Intends to dry off in about two weeks. Cow condition was good. We had a discussion about how best to manage some over-conditioned cows and how they could be batched and fed less silage and more straw (50% silage and 50% straw). Having cows calve down in BCS above 3.5 increases risk of calving difficulties, milk fever, mastitis and womb infections post-calving.

We identified a number of cows that were mildly lame and arranged a return visit to hoof-pare them. When pared, the predominant finding was white line disease. We saw a high incidence of white line disease in September, October and November. This can be largely attributed to the very wet weather in this period.

When cows' feet are constantly standing in wet fields, wet roadways and yards, their hooves tend to soften. These hooves are then more vulnerable to white line disease lameness.

On examination, these feet only needed to be pared. There was no need for antibiotic injections to be given. This represented a significant saving and no risk of an antibiotic ending up in the bulk tank.

Silage analysis results were not available, so that's a discussion for the next visit.

We also considered blood-sampling some cows to determine the herd status in relation to IBR and leptospirosis. Prevention of these diseases contributes to the overall health of any dairy herd. Keeping these diseases under control helps reduce the level of usage of antibiotics on farms.