Activities

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Additional information

Finding ways to avoid or drastically limit the use of antibiotics is becoming an important goal for all types of livestock production, but it is of crucial importance in organic dairy herd health management. Many candidate strategies to improve udder health are not widely implemented in organic dairy farms due to the lack of science based knowledge confirming the efficacy of non-antibiotic therapies.



The project Quality Low Input Food aimed to identify the main factors influencing udder health in organic dairy farms under different climatic and structural conditions. Results showed that improvement of housing and environmental conditions and farmers’ skills allows partial conversion to a treatment scheme based on teat sealant dry-off prophylaxis, which reduces the need to use antibiotics. Besides, two common medical dry-off practices in organic dairying, internal teat sealant and herd specific homeopathic remedies were compared with an untreated control. The results indicate that in herds with good udder health with few environmental infections, a treatment at drying off can be omitted. Only in case of increased environmental infection risk, a strategic teat sealant usage is recommended. http://www.qlif.org/