Effect of dry cow therapy on incidence of clinical mastitis,milk yield and composition in crossbred cows

Abstract

Mastitis is considered as one of the important production disease in dairy cows which incurs huge economic losses to dairy industry, despite considerable efforts has been dedicated to solve it for the last two decades. In the present study, the impact of dry cow therapy (DCT) on incidence of clinical mastitis, milk yield and composition in crossbred cows was studied. About 20 healthy crossbred cows were selected at dry-off and randomly allotted either to control or treatment group. Daily milk yield of cows was recorded up to 45 days post-partum and fortnightly separate quarter wise milk samples were collected for estimation of milk composition. While no quarter in the treatment group showed clinical mastitis, 33.33% of quarters in control group showed clinical mastitis within 45 days post-partum. Milk production increased by 9.71, 8.40 and 18.18% during first, second and third fortnight with overall value 11.84% during the entire 45 days post-calving period in DCT treated cows compared to control group. Also, the overall fat-corrected milk, solid-corrected milk and energy-corrected milk production following 45 days post-partum increased significantly (P<0.05) by 22.71, 23.70 and 22.80%, respectively in treated group than control group. However, overall mean milk components such as fat, protein, lactose, SNF and TS remained similar between treatment and control groups. Taken together, the above results indicated that DCT increased milk yield by reducing incidence of clinical mastitis during early lactation.