Mastitis

LaurieLovesLearning
LaurieLovesLearning Posts: 7,573 admin
edited March 2022 in Cattle

We think mastitis was building for a few days before we clued in. These were possible factors...We had a bull that stressed her terribly (he would rather suck a cow than breed). We also had a new type of mineral block that appeared to be a possible factor. Maybe the wet outside (?) but she always came in with a clean bag and we clean it every milking.

Her milk was cutting down drastically. She had no fever, no cottage cheesy/stringy stuff in the milk, udder not sensitive when touched, it wasn't red...not many of the usual signs, except for a drop in milk, not eating her rolled grain, more salty milk, and a hard udder. She didn't want the calf to suck. We did have to assess if the milk became more salty due to the municipality's bad practice of dumping inconsistent amounts of chlorine into the municipal supply around that time or if it was truly mastitis...swimming pool days is what we call the dumping days. 😩 Chlorinated water can do that too and our municipality dumps lots in at a time.

Anyway, we put some ACV in the water, 1/4 c. of ACV in her feed (which she ate heartily) at each 2 hr. milking and massaged her udder with ACV. We also put on an all natural Canadian product called Fiskes. It had pine tar, peppermint EO, and camphor EO which are all good to use on mastitis. It has eucalyptus & one other EO as well. I had thought of infusing peppermint into oil & wondered if that could be done with cabbage too (cabbage is awesome for women with mastitis but hard to put in a cow's non existent bra!). When I looked up cold herbs for mastitis, I found an online university site that stated those 3 natural things would help, so I grabbed the Fiskes & the ACV. It was all ready for me. No infusing time needed.

So, we milked her every 2 hours on the first day of treatment, fed her ACV with her rolled barley, & rubbed the ACV & Fiskes on as well. By the next day, her big calf had sucked her dry and her bag was soft. She gave a better amount of milk that next milking time. She has had no more issues.

We have heard that ACV, massage & regular milking is enough, but we wanted everything at our disposal to go into our jersey cow.

The camphor was supposed to change milk flavor, but the cats didn't care. 😂

This is WAY better than putting on a bought liniment that requires going to the store (first of all) and then discarding the milk for many days following.

Hopefully this information can be of use to someone as mastitis is not something that anyone wants to deal with.