Automatic milking and incidence of mastisis in cows

One of the main aspects of obtaining milk of high sanitary quality is functioning of milking equipment. Currently, the main volume of dairy products produced comes from dairy complexes equipped with milking parlors with automatic milking system. However, as practice shows, in the automatic milking system, settings may fail and be incorrectly set, leading to negative effect on mammary gland of cows. Hence, the goal of the research was to study the effect of settings of automatic milking equipment (vacuum in teat chamber, minimum milk flow when removing milking machines) on functional state of mammary gland of high-yielding lactating cows. The experiments were carried out in two milking parlors. At milking parlor 1, there was no maintenance of milking machine for three years. At milking parlor 2, there was regular maintenance with testing of each milking machine. It was established that with regular maintenance (milking parlor 2), the “milking vacuum” was in the range of 37…39 kPa, in the main pipe - 40…42 kPa, i. e. the difference was no more than 2-3 kPa. Insufficient vacuum in teat chamber (34…36 kPa) resulted in 1.6-2.0-fold increase in duration of milking, 2.5-4.0-fold increase in number of cows with udder irritation, 3.0-4.2-fold increase in incidence of subclinical mastitis, 3.2-11.8-fold increase in incidence of clinical mastitis, 2.0-3.2-fold increase in number of somatic cells in collected milk. Increase in minimum milk flow up to 450…500 g/min after turning off the milking machine ensures 3.9-fold reduction in the number of cows with udder irritation, 4.1-fold reduction of cows with subclinical mastitis, 21.2-fold reduction of cows with clinical mastitis, and 4.2-fold decrease in the number of somatic cells in collected milk (145.5 thousand/ml that corresponds to premium milk).