Application of Cleaning and Cooling Principles to Robotic Milking

The key to properly diagnosing cleaning and sanitation problems is identifying the types of bacteria present in bulk tank milk. Periodic culturing of bulk tank milk is also an essential tool to diagnose milk quality issues related to mastitis. These methods are described in greater detail in Reinemann et al. (2002) and Ruegg and Reinemann (2002). Collection of the type of bulk tank culture data presented here should be a routine practice on any farm concerned with product quality, especially those learning to use new technology such as automatic milking. If the dairy producer is not sufficiently motivated to acquire this type of data, it would behoove milk quality consultants to use these methods to correctly diagnose the source of elevated bacteria counts and solve these problems in an expeditious manner, before they become a crisis.