The effect of udder precleaning on milk quality and yield

Sammanfattning: This study was performed in Vietnam as a minor field study. The country has a fast growing demand of dairy products, but too few dairy cattle to produce enough quantity of milk. This problem is at present solved by import of milk from countries such as the United States, Australia and the Netherlands. The dairy sector is fairly new in Vietnam and the knowledge about dairy farming is rather poor. The Vietnamese farmers need to improve their knowledge in how to keep the dairy cattle, in order to increase the countries own dairy production. The udder health of the dairy cattle is one important factor in order to raise the milk yield. A way of measure the udder health and milk quality is by milk somatic cell count (SCC) and the total bacteria count (TBC). These two factors are affected by bacteria in the surrounding and a way of limiting them is by cleaning the teat before the milking is done. The aim with the current study was to examine if a proper cleaning before milking, would result in, a lower bacteria number, a reduced milk SCC and thereby a higher milk quality. The experiment was performed by a change over design with four different treatments. The treatments was; hand milking and traditional precleaning, hand milking with properly precleaning, bucket machine milking with traditional precleaning and bucket machine milking with properly precleaning. The study was carried out 40 km north west of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) on 12 Holstein-Friesian cows. They were milked twice a day and the experimental period lasted for 40 days with 10 days within each treatment. It was found that the hand milking treatments gave a higher yield in the afternoon milking compared with the machine milking (P< 0.05). The SCC was high for all four treatments, but no significant difference was found between the treatments. There was a large variation between different cows and also within the same animals but in different days. The TBC differed significant between the periods where period 2 had low values of bacteria. However, there was no significance found between the treatments.