The dry period of a cow is an important element in having a successful next lactation, selecting the most suitable dry off treatment is part of this. Additionally, these days, many farmers are dealing with minimizing the use of antibiotics, for example by decreasing the use of preventative antibiotic usage. Drying off a cow is a moment when often antibiotics are used. To keep cows healthy, it is important to know the effect of a treatment on the health of the cow. For these reasons, we have developed the dry off treatment analysis. On this page you can analyze the dry off treatments registered in Horizon and their effectiveness. By this, we offer the opportunity to optimize your dry off strategy. The dry off treatment analysis is developed to analyze the effect of dry off treatments in the herd over time. The result shown in this tool can be used to optimize and fine tune dry off treatments in the future based on the monitored effectiveness.
Where to find the dry off treatment analysis page:
- Reports > Health (tab) > Dry off treatment analysis (right side above)
Dry off treatments I Monthly comparison
The Dry off treatments bar chart shows the usage of the dry off treatments that were registered in Horizon per month. It shows the data of last year and the months of the current year till present.
Dry off treatment effectiveness last 365 days
The table dry off treatment effectiveness last 365 days gives an overview of the effectiveness of the registered treatments on SCC per lactation number. When you hover over a column header, a tooltip with an explanation about the column will appear.
Meaning of the columns:
- Lactation nr.: The cows are grouped in lactation 1, 2, and 3 and higher
- Avg SCC before dry off: Average SCC 60 days before dry off
- Low: SCC before dry off and after calving lower than 250
- Improved: SCC before dry off higher than 250 and after calving lower than 250
- Still high: SCC before dry off and after calving higher than 250
- Worse: SCC before dry off lower than 250 and after calving higher than 250
The time after calving that is taken into account for calculating the new average cell count at the beginning of the lactation is 35 days.
Cell count measurement (MQCC) or milk sampling data is required to show the dry off treatment analyses. If both are available, the average of the MQCC and the milk sampling are calculated.
Currently, we use the threshold cell count of 250 because this threshold at it is most often used for evaluation of somatic cell count