The transition from pregnant, non-lactating to non-pregnant, lactating is too often a disastrous experience for the cow. Most of the metabolic diseases of dairy cows milk fever, ketosis, retained placenta, and displacement of the abomasum occur within the first 2 wk of lactation. In addition to metabolic disease, the majority of infectious disease experienced by the dairy cow, especially mastit...

The transition from pregnant, non-lactating to non-pregnant, lactating is too often a disastrous experience for the cow. Most of the metabolic diseases of dairy cows milk fever, ketosis, retained placenta (RP), and displacement of the abomasum occur within the first two wk of lactation. In addition to metabolic disease, the majority of infectious disease experienced by the dairy cow, especially...

In contrast to nonruminants, forage-fed ruminants normally absorb very little glucose from their feed. However, glucose supply is still crucial for maintenance and productive functions in ruminants, such as growing and lactating cattle. Glucose supply is especially important for the lactating dairy cow because of the demands of milk synthesis for glucose. Glucose requirements of ruminants are l...

The objective of this research, was to quantify sustainability indicators of organic dairy farms using Automatic Milking Systems (AMS), and a comparative group of organic dairy farms using conventional milking systems (CMS). Milk yield per cow was higher for AMS farms but did not result in higher net return to management. Nitrogen surplus per ha of available land was higher for AMS farms, Anima...

Cattle comfort is one of the main factors which influence profitability of dairy farms due to its association with involuntary culling, cow longevity, and productive life. Productive life has been defined as the number of lactations a cow completes before she is culled. A productive cow that remains longer in a farm allows for fixed and variable costs to be diluted. Furthermore, fewer replaceme...

Introduction Maintaining consumers trust is essential to ensure the future of the dairy industry. Production of high quality milk from healthy, well cared for animals is the goal of most dairy farmers. However, as fewer and fewer consumers are familiar with dairy farming, they have become more skeptical about the ability of farmers to properly care for farm animals. Public attention about the w...

uterine infection is one of the reproductive diseases that can have disturbing postpartumuterine health in cattle. therefore, identification of resistant genotypes to uterine infection isimportant. lactoferrin (lf) is one of the major antimicrobial compounds in the normal uterinedischarges of cows. we hypothesized that allelic diversity in lf gene may contribute tosusceptibility or resistance t...

pioglitazone belongs to the thiazolidinedione (tzd) class of antidiabetic agents, with proven efficacy in increasing insulin sensitivity and in the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus in humans. pioglitazone has been proposed as a potential feed additive to reduce insulin resistance and consequently some of the metabolic disorders in transition cows. this study was aimed at determining the...

to evaluate the effects of physically processed flaxseed [ground flaxseed (gfs) and whole flaxseed(wfs)] as a replacement for extruded soybeans on feed intake, milk production, milk composition, milk fatty acid (fa) composition and blood biochemical parameters, nine primiparus holstein dairy lactating cowsaveraging 495 ± 34.5 kg of body weight (bw) and 70 ± 5 days in milk (dim) were assigned in...

Dairy cow mortality causes financial loss and is increasing over time; it indicates suboptimal herd health or welfare. To describe the herd-level and contextual factors affecting cow mortality, the French National Bovine Dataset Identification was used to create dairy, beef, or fattening units within farms, for 2005 and 2006. Mortality rate (MO-RA, outcome variable) and most variables were calc...