Healthy udders through a herd health perspective
Coordinator: Riitta Niemi, University of Helsinki,
Bovine mastitis is an inflammation of the mammary gland, primarily caused by bacterial infections. It is the most common disease affecting dairy cows in modern production systems and therefore represents the leading cause of antibiotic use in adult dairy cattle. Mastitis also reduces milk quality as well as farm profitability and can, in clinical cases, compromise animal welfare.
The One Health approach and animal welfare aspects highlight the need for effective herd-level mastitis management, to not only improve animal health and farm economics, but also to diminish its broader implications for public health and environmental sustainability.
Monitoring diseases is a prerequisite for the management of animal health in dairy herds. The goal of optimal farm-level monitoring is the identification of areas with potential to improve, and the consecutive implementation of the most effective preventive measures.
Mastitis is a multifactorial disease caused by many different pathogens. This means that factors such as the specific milking, housing, and feeding management, but also environmental conditions such as heat stress, play an important role in the establishment of clinical cases. Therefore, mastitis management can be challenging for dairy farmers, and the most effective strategies depend on regional and farm specific conditions. To address these challenges, it is important to define the optimal herd-level key performance indicators as well as the relevant herd-level information for efficient monitoring, identification of the most important risk factors, and the most effective prevention strategies. Establishing guidelines for mastitis management, specifically in the Nordic context, is important to further strengthen the economic sustainability of dairy farming in the Nordics and aid the continuous improvement of animal health and welfare.
In the past years, the NKJ funded the two successful networks “Healthy udders for sustainable milk production 2017-2019” and “Healthy udders with low or no use of antibiotics 2020-2021”. The NKJ funding of these previous networks has been a crucial element to initiate and establish collaborations between the partners of this network, to benefit from each other’s experiences, and to ensure a high scientific research quality. The established network assembles people with many different backgrounds in the context of udder health management who will bring up-to-date knowledge on evidence-based mastitis management from various successfully conducted and ongoing research projects, as well as from advisory work with farmers.
Network partners in “Healthy udders through a herd health perspective” are:
• University of Helsinki
• University of Life Sciences Norway
• Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
• Swedish Veterinary Agency
• University of Copenhagen