Key udder health parameters on dairy farms with an automated milking system

Despite the increasing use of automated milking systems (AMS), udder health performance of farms has only been limitedly quantified on farms with a milking robot. The objective of this study was to quantify udder health parameters (UHP) at test-day and at herd level on robotic farms using routinely collected somatic cell counts (SCC) from test-day data, and to study the correlations between these UHP. Additionally, the associations between UHP and season, year and farm size as well as the association between the daily milk production and the herd milk SCC were investigated. To this end, we collected SCC test-day data from 48 Belgian and Dutch farms participating in the milk recording of a local dairy herd improvement program. The UHP were calculated based on individual animal records at each test day over three years (2017 until 2019). These UHP included herd milk SCC, average heifer SCC, average cow SCC, percentage of high SCC, percentage of new high SCC, percentage of chronic high SCC, percentage of high SCC cows after calving, and percentage of recovery during the lactation. By fitting a linear mixed model effect for each of the different UHP, significant associations between the UHP and season, year and farm size were observed at test-day level. A poorer udder health was observed during summer compared to other seasons and generally, larger farms performed worse than smaller farms. Using a linear regression model, a significant negative correlation between herd average SCC and average daily milk production was found: an increase of 6,085 cells/mL was associated with a decrease of one kg of milk production. Finally, the cow-level UHP were averaged over all test days of the entire study period per farm to investigate the farm-level udder health performance and correlations between them. At the farm level, UHP analysis revealed most farms had poor udder health performance (i.e. the herd milk SCC, average heifer SCC, average cow SCC, percentage of new high and chronic high SCC were all higher than their target values) as proposed by Barkema et al. (2013). Both at the farm and at test day level, strong correlations were found among the UHP. Similar to studies on farms with conventional milking systems, a strong correlation between herd milk SCC and the percentage of new and chronic high SCC cows was found. This study gives new insights into udder health performance on farms with an AMS and provides veterinarians and other dairy industry stakeholders with concrete benchmarks for udder health performance on farms.