Relationships Between Milk Acetone and Clinical Metabolic Disease in Dairy Herds

Abstract

Negative energy balance in the post-partum dairy cow, as indicated by elevated blood and milk ketone levels, has been linked to decreased milk production and increased metabolic disease such as clinical ketosis and displaced abomasum. If groups of cows in negative energy balance could be identified in a cost-effective manner, management could intervene in a timely fashion to correct the problem. A collaborative project involving Foss Electric and Ontario Dairy Herd Improvement (DHI) was established to evaluate a prototype milk acetone analyzer that could test DHI milk samples for the presence of acetone. The objective was to investigate relationships between test-day milk acetone and incidence of clinical ketosis (Ket), displaced abomasum (DA) and lameness (Lame). The final data set included 199 herds, which had all milking cows tested for acetone on every DHI test date from January to September 1999. Included were 60,257 test day samples from approximately 14,000 cows. These herds recorded all occurrences of DA, Ket and Lame.