ANALYSIS OF ANNUAL HEALTH RECORDS IN ONE DAIRY FARM

Abstract

Modern technologies of dairy cows breeding is followed by a number of health problems. Perhaps no one single factor has the ability to affect the performance of animal populations as severely as diseases. The objective of this study was to obtain information about dairy cow’s health challenges for intensive dairy farm and about the guidelines which should be improved. A one year retrospective study was performed for prevalence determination of the most common health disorders in one dairy farm. The survey included a total of 203 black-white dairy cows in lactation. Cows with health disorders were detected by clinical observation. The data for each cow were obtained from the reproductive board. The annual prevalence of health disorders was 50.25%. The most prevalent health disorder in dairy herd was mastitis (84.31%), than following arthritis (5.88), laminitis (2.94%), abscess (2.94%), indigestion (1.96%), pneumonia (0.98%) and diarrhea (0.98%). The highest prevalence was registered in winter season (88.89%) and the lowest in summer season of the year (38.16%). The older cows had the highest risk to suffer from such health disorder. During the survey, only cows that suffer from mastitis manifested repeated cases of disease during lactation. Regardless parities, the first case of health disorder in dairy herd occurred on the average 96.64±8.532 days in lactation. The average period needed for treatment of diseased cows was 3.69±0.121 days. The method of GLM, univariate procedure, was used to analyze risk factors which are responsible for occurring of health disorders in dairy farm. Among the risk factors that were found to affect the health of dairy cows, season of year had have significant influence at level p<0.001, while total milk yield estimated for 305 days in lactation influenced at level p<0.01.