Tackling the future challenges of Organic Animal Husbandry - vTI

RAHMANN G & GODINHO D (Ed.) (2012): Tackling the Future Challenges of Organic Animal Husbandry.
Proceedings of the 2 nd OAHC, Hamburg/Trenthorst, Germany, Sep 12-14, 2012
Material and methodology
Treatment data was collected and analysed in 68 farms from a preventive udder health supporting
programme conducted from 2003 to 2009 (Ivemeyer et al., 2008)., A total of 2018 diagnosis items
was flagged with the item “udder treatment” including dry cow therapy and constitutional treatments
by homeopathy. A treatment cycle was defined as a single or series of treatments according
to one diagnosis with a maximum therapy length of 10 days. In particular, clinical mastitis cases
had been considered. In total 420 clinical cases finally were enrolled in this analysis.
Because the intent of the project is to improve udder health and to reduce antibiotic treatments,
most of the farms implemented a non-antibiotic therapy system based on complementary and alternative
medicine (CAM), such as homeopathy, additional milking out, and phyto-therapeutical ointments.
Advisors provided therapy recommendations accompanied by analysis of follow-up data,
milk records, bacteriological and clinical findings in order to control therapy effects and, if necessary
also to change therapy to antibiotic. Depending on the goal of farmers, many cases were treated
by antibiotics primarily as well (n=173), but in most of the cases (n=247) non-antibiotic
measures were applied.
To assess therapy outcome, the researchers established different outcome categories based on the
somatic cell count at the second milk recording after treatment conducted by breeding association.
Udder health state was classified as inconspicuous (Category AA) when cows received no subsequent
antibiotic treatment and somatic cell count (SCC) was