Mastitis Control Plan.

The Mastitis Control Plan principles have been used as the basis of the AHDB initiative QuarterPRO, which encourages regular monitoring of udder health, and provides tools and resources for farmers and their advisers to achieve this.

Tools freely available for use in the QuarterPRO approach to mastitis control can be accessed from the links below.

The process of producing a Mastitis Pattern Analysis report, as used in the QuarterPRO approach to mastitis control, has been updated and streamlined. Instead of needing two pieces of software ( the cdl converter and separate Pattern Analysis Tool) , a report can be automatically generated from a farmer's milk recording.

This has been made possible through a collaboration between QMMS Ltd and the University of Nottingham to improve the predictions, followed by funding from the BBSRC/AHDB Catalysing Partnerships initiative to set up an automated data transfer pipeline between milk recording organisations and a cloud-based analysis platform. The cloud-based platform is hosted within the new “REMEDY” infrastructure being built as part of a larger InnovateUK project.

Farmers can register to access the new service at https://cloud.remedy.farm/mpat. Their Milk Recording Organisation will then check permissions with them and put an automated data pipeline in place for their data. The pattern analysis reports will be received by email, and generated after each milk recording.

More details on the development of the algorithms used in the new tool can be found in the paper by Hyde et al, 2020: Automated prediction of mastitis infection patterns in dairy herds using machine learning) available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61126-8. 

A simple cost calculator , which gives an indication of the direct and indirect costs of mastitis in a herd, based on some simple input information, is available to download.

Full instructions are available within the calculator.