It’s tempting to think of the dry period as a resting time when we put our pregnant cows in another pen or maybe offsite and in some ways, just forget about them. Often dry cows are moved into an older facility with smaller stalls while they’re getting bigger and bigger.
“A cow’s next lactation starts the moment we dry her off, not when she lays down to calve,” said Dr. Roger Thomson, academic specialist at Michigan State University. “The real trigger for any new mastitis infections – whether it’s the dry period or the lactating period – is bacteria entering the teat end. It’s so easy to say but so hard to manage and keep under control.”
The kinds of facilities where dry cows live impact the risk for new infections from farm to farm. In some regions, there are huge variations in seasonal weather conditions to consider:
- Upper Midwest – Dry cows may be moved out to pasture, which works well unless you have low spots that can accumulate water after rainstorms. Larger dairies have too many to put on pasture, so they may use an old facility that has a bedded pack or free stalls that are undersized for modern genetics.
- West – Dry cows are moved into an open lot. If a cow’s dry period happens to fall during the rainy season, then she will have a greater risk of freshening with mastitis and other fresh cow diseases.
- South – Use seasonal breeding. They prefer to freshen in early fall because it’s optimal to milk cows in the winter in places like Florida. The summertime heat and humidity can be very hard on dry cows, especially if facilities get overloaded.
“The risk of new infections is really fundamental: if I can keep my facilities clean and dry, then my risk of new infections is significantly lower,” said Thomson. “If I have a facility that’s undersized, my dry cows are overstocked, the stalls don’t fit the cows or the bedding is wet, then my risk is much higher. Mitigating the risk of new infections during the dry period is really important because research from Smith and Hogan at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) in Wooster, Ohio, indicates that 66% of new environmental mastitis cases, during the first 60 days in milk (DIM), can trace their origin to the previous dry period. These fresh cow mastitis cases are the most expensive because they impact the entire lactation.”
Facilities
Keeping facilities for dry cows as clean and dry as possible can get missed in the busy day-to-day activities of any size dairy farm.
“It can be so tempting to push back scraping alleys and keeping stalls bedded in the midst of all the other things that need to be done,” Thomson said. “Unless you’re really organized and have people doing it every day, the way it should be, it can get pushed back a few days. Then it’s a week later, and it’s still not done. Another challenge for these non-lactating pens is that the cows are always home. They must be moved from one alley to another. Gates need to be installed and maintained to make this job easier and safer for cows and humans.”
During the dry period, cows are lifting 200 or more pounds of extra weight. If the stalls are too small, if they lack adequate lunge space or are low on bedding, it makes it that much harder for a pregnant cow to stand up for water and feed.
Dryoff Technique
“The dairy staff assigned to dryoff cows usually start out as an assembly line of the finest quality, but they’ll start taking shortcuts,” he said. “As dairies get larger, this important yet routine task becomes a mind-numbing, repetitive task. I’ve observed workers not wiping teat ends with an alcohol-soaked wipe before dry tube insertion. I have seen caps removed, exposing the sterile canula, and the tube is put in a dirty coverall pocket or laid on an open jetter tray because it’s faster. My strongest recommendation to help your team prepare teat ends is to throw out the tiny wipes that come in the box of tubes and purchase the alcohol-soaked dairy prep towels that come in a pail. Your staff and cows will thank you.”
It’s important to train and retrain the standardized dryoff protocol developed by your management team and attending veterinarian because the risk of contamination is high during the process.
“When using an internal teat sealant following the antibiotic tube, we’re doubling the risk of pushing bacteria up the streak canal,” he explained. “All the hygiene we do is doubly important when using an internal teat sealant.”
Cow Comfort
Hygiene and bedding are closely associated with cow comfort, but more producers are becoming aware of the importance of the cow’s immune system during the dry and close-up periods and how that’s connected to her comfort.
“This is driven by a good balanced diet,” he said. “The big variation I see is dry matter intake. Straw-based diets for the far-off and close-up cows have helped reduce certain fresh cow health issues. To get a cow to eat these bulky formulations, particle length has to be precise, and the cows have to be really comfortable to keep their appetites up.”
To improve comfort, more producers are putting fans in the barns for dry cows and sprinklers in the feed alley. When it gets hot, this helps keep dry matter intakes up just like in lactating pens.
“We need to offer as comfortable of an environment during the dry period as we do during the lactating period,” he noted. “Measuring transition pen dry matter intake (DMI), fresh cow disease events and Week 4, Week 8 and Week 12 milk production are how you can evaluate the success of your entire dry period program. The producers who master this will achieve what I call historic production per cow with peaks averaging more than 180 pounds per day.”
Headline image courtesy of Michigan State University
