Good Nutrition Helps Cows Fight Off Mastitis Infections Agri-View: Feature Stories

"You can't shake management out of a feed sack."

So reminded Jim Spain, a University of Missouri-Extension dairy specialist during the recent Wisconsin Dairy School, sponsored by Alltech. Spain noted that good management - the kind that prevents mastitis or at least keeps it under control - is a "total system."

That total system, he explained, can involve several people - people who must do their jobs properly and at the right times. The person cleaning and bedding stalls, the person feeding the cows, and the person milking all have important roles to play, he asserted.

Stir into the mix other important ingredients, too. Spain mentioned the cow environment, along with proper nutrition helping prevent mastitis.

Speaking in a meeting room on the third floor of the Lambeau Field Atrium at Green Bay, Spain used an unusual, yet appropriate, analogy. The Missourian compared Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre to a top-producing dairy cow.

One reason Favre has been able to not miss starting a National Football League game for more than 15 years, Spain said, is that he is somehow geared toward longevity. That's similar to the dairy cow that set a production record on two-time-day milking. She produced 59,300 pounds of milk in one 305-day lactation.

Spain said he saw that cow eat, and it was like a "front-end loader," he described. "What could she have done had she not had coliform mastitis?" the dairy specialist wondered.

Mastitis is by no means a new disease, Spain reminded. But scientists and dairy producers alike have learned more about just what causes this infection of the mammary gland and how it spreads.

Not too many decades ago, Spain said, people thought cows got mastitis from drinking out of stagnant pools. They were partly right. Spain said those cows really got mastitis from "slopping around" in that polluted water.

Researchers and farmers have also learned that there are two types of mastitis - contagious and environmental. Spain pointed out that more and more dairy operations are battling the environmental strain, while fewer are fighting the contagious kind.

With environmental mastitis, prevention is more important than treatment, Spain continued. Preventing environmental mastitis hinges greatly on good cow nutrition and a clean living and milking area.

Good udder health is important in preventing environmental mastitis. And Spain said it's also a matter of "balance" between exposure to mastitis-causing pathogens and a cow being able to resist them.

"Cows will be exposed," the dairy specialist assured. "Until we can get cows to quit pooping, they're going to be exposed to mastitis."

Clean environment

But cows in good health - thanks to proper nutrition and a clean environment - can better resist diseases, such as mastitis. Spain reminded that it's not just the right kind of bedding in a stall that keeps mastitis-causing bacteria from thriving, but it's also stall maintenance.

He discussed three types of bedding materials - chopped straw and paper, pine sawdust, and hardwood shavings. All three harbored hundreds of thousands of mastitis organisms at the fronts of the stalls. But moving to the backs of the stalls revealed mastitis-causing bacteria in the millions - as high as 59 million.

"We need to get cows to back into stalls," Spain joked. But he quickly added that there's a "strong correlation" between udder cleanliness and how stressed cows' immune systems are.

Spain showed a slide of a cow lying in what he described as a fairly clean stall. Trouble was, her tail hung in the alleyway, which was several inches deep with liquid manure.

That cow, he related, invariably swiped her dirty tail over her back. The result was manure running down her side and onto her udder.

The dairy specialist remarked that perhaps, sometimes dairy producers should not focus so much attention on premilking procedures when it comes to battling mastitis. "Maybe you need to send the guy who takes care of the stalls in to milk for a day," he suggested.

Transition cows

Not many dairy farmers keep track of the severity and duration of cases of mastitis, Spain said. But many producers do know that 90 percent of the mastitis cases appear during the first 90 days of lactation.

Why is that? Some of it is due to cows being under a great deal of stress from calving, Spain explained.

At calving time, fetal cortisol - a stress hormone - in the cow's bloodstream rises. That lowers her immunity. At about the same time, her estrogen level climbs, too, then falls after calving.

One result is "a lot of stress on that udder," the dairy specialist pointed out.

Making matters worse is that a cow's keratin plugs that protect her teats from invading organisms are gone part of the time, due to milking. What's more, an udder swollen with vast amounts of milk after freshening is more prone to milking machine liner slippage. That means more teat irritation.

Mastitis sometimes accompanies or immediately follows other troubles a just-fresh cow goes through, Spain pointed out. He said cows are eight times more likely to get mastitis if they've recently had milk fever. And they're twice as likely to contract mastitis if they've recently suffered from ketosis.

Another problem that can make mastitis worse is fatty liver. A fatty liver, Spain noted, can't remove toxins from the body as efficiently as a healthy liver can.

Heat stress

Heat stress can compound all those problems, he cautioned. Even in weather that's not particularly hot, a pregnant cow is hotter than she normally would be because her growing fetus generates heat. The heat problems get compounded on a warm, humid day.

"Ever been around a pregnant woman in late July, early August?" Spain asked his mostly male audience. "How miserable is she?"

Cows under heat stress rapidly lose essential fatty acids, Spain said. One study found that feeding raw, cracked soybeans might help restore those fatty acids.

Cows in that study were fed seven pounds of soybeans a day for 40 days. The result, according to Spain, was a "significant increase" in the level of fatty acids in their systems.

"Does it have to be beans?" Spain asked. "I don't know."

Nutrition tips

Spain offered a few other nutrition tips to keep cows' immune systems strong and help protect them from getting mastitis infections: