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Professional Dairy Producers (PDPW) introduces Dairy AdvanCE, a new online, one-stop professional development shop for the dairy industry.

This month’s VAS DC305 tip is on transition. How well animals transition will greatly affect how they will do in their next lactation. Poor transition will not only affect the production of the animal for the next lactation, but will also affect reproduction, somatic cell count and lifetime in the herd. All are very important and lead to lost income.

This month’s VAS DC305 tip is on clinical mastitis. Clinical mastitis is a very costly disease. Although poor milk procedures, dirty environments and faulty equipment can predispose cows, most mastitis is caused by an infectious agent. Treatment of mastitis (MAST event in DC305) caused by certain bacteria is not improved by antibiotic therapy, so not treating those cows will decrease antibiotic use, decrease hospital days and decrease milk withheld from sale.

This month’s VAS DC305 tip is on parlor performance. Using the parlor performance reports in DC305 helps you take advantage of many of the benefits of daily milk meters plus look for cows that fail to produce the expected amount of milk.

Lameness can be the most costly disease on dairies, even more so than mastitis. This is due to the high incidence of lameness on dairies. It is not uncommon to find 30 percent yearly incidence or higher on dairies. Yet lameness is one of the least entered and tracked disease.

In July 2016, the Dairy Focus team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign released information about the Somatic Cell Count Calculator. We reached out to Phil Cardoso, professor in animal sciences, for more information about the calculator and why it was developed.