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Dairy Herd Health

Simple Rules for Keeping a Herd Healthy

Department of Veterinary Clinical Medicine, University of Illinois

ABSTRACT

One of the most elementary rules for maintaining a disease-free herd is to maintain a closed herd. That is, buy no animals or buy as few as possible. If a herd must be enlarged and the increase can be anticipated, purchase immature, unbred heifers. Open and immature heifers are less likely to harbor organisms of disease that can be disseminated to the milking herd. Neither the reproductive tract nor the mammary gland is sufficiently developed in the heifer calf to harbor or permit the growth of organisms (bacteria) most likely to cause epidemic diseases in a dairy herd. The two groups of disease conditions most important to the dairyman are mastitis and infertility, which is just a broad, all-inclusive term for all breeding disorders.

Buy Only Disease-Free Cattle

Obviously, if only disease-free animals are to be purchased, the purchaser must know the health status of the herds from which replacements originate.