Herd Testing

This week I have had the opportunity to carry out some more rather interesting activities.
1. Herd Testing
This is where individual samples of milk is taken from every milking animal and it taken to the lab and tested for various things such as milk fat, protein and somatic cell count and volume.  This is only a snap shot but helps determine factors such as:

• high or low producing animals
• infections in udder eg. mastitis

(Somatic cells are all the body cells except reproductive cells)

Herd testing is on a commercial farm is generally done 3-4 times in a year.(It is a very costly exercise) However because DairyNZ is a research farm and because there are so many trials occurring, and it also builds up quite a lot of data.

2. Jen Cuts
Also known as a low cut harvester.  This little machine enables you to cut crops to various crops and harvest it and weigh it and work out the amount of dry matter in a block.

3. Rising Plate meter

This is a farm management tool that farmers use to quantify pasture cover on a farm.  It is one of the tools that is used to help allocate pasture to stock.  If you do it pre and post grazing measurements this ensures that the pasture has been grazed enough and or the stock are getting enough food. Basically the plate meter measures the compressed height of the grass and using an equation (which has been calibrated) converts the grass height into kg DM (kilograms dry matter)

If you are interested in more about the Rising Plate meter go to the following website where it explains it. www.dairynz.co.nz/media/253639/1-15_Using_the_Rising_Plate_Meter.pdf

4. Blood testing 

 

There are a lot of things that can be tested through an animal's blood.  Blood is usually collected through the tail vein, however if it can not be drawn from here it can be taken from the jugular vein in the neck of the animal.
Once the blood is taken off the animal it is stored on ice, then it is returned to the lab to be processed which could involve it being spun in a centrifuge to separate the plasma from the red and white blood cells.