Relationship among Milk Conductivity, Production Traits, and Somatic Cell Score in the Italian Mediterranean Buffalo.

Abstract

Simple SummaryMastitis can be considered one of the costliest diseases of the dairy Mediterranean Buffalo. Early detection of the disease is thus of great importance to farmers, to reduce or prevent production losses. The measurement of electrical conductivity (EC) of milk is a relatively simple and inexpensive technique, and it has been studied as a routine method for the diagnosis of mastitis in dairy farm. Limited information is currently available on the relationships among EC, production traits and somatic cells count in Italian Mediterranean Buffalo. Hence, the aim of this study was to investigate those correlations using data collected at a commercial Italian buffalo farm. We can conclude that in buffalo, as in other species, there is a strong relationship between EC and somatic cells. Furthermore, we observed that, if the objective is to have an additional and informative parameter for early detection of mastitis, frequent EC recording, possibly performed over a longer period of time, is more effective than recording EC only a few times. Even if our results are encouraging, further studies are needed, in order to validate them, especially if the objective is the development of udder disease prediction models.The measurement of milk electrical conductivity (EC) is a relatively simple and inexpensive technique that has been evaluated as a routine method for the diagnosis of mastitis in dairy farms. The aim of this study was to obtain further knowledge on relationships between EC, production traits and somatic cell count (SCC) in Italian Mediterranean Buffalo. The original dataset included 5411 records collected from 808 buffalo cows. Two mixed models were used to evaluate both the effect of EC on MY, PP and FP and EC at test-day, and the effect of EC on somatic cell score (SCS) by using five different parameters (EC_param), namely: EC collected at the official milk recording test day (EC_day0), EC collected 3 days before official milk recording (EC_day3), and three statistics calculated from EC collected 1, 3 and 5 days before each test-day, respectively. All effects included in the model were significant for all traits, with the only exception of the effect of EC nested within parity for FP. The relationship between EC and SCS was always positive, but of different magnitude according to the parity. The regression of EC on SCS at test-day using different EC parameters was always significant except when the regression parameter was the slope obtained from a linear regression of EC collected over the 5-day period. Moreover, in order to evaluate how well the different models fit the data, three parameters were used: the Average Information Criteria (AIC), the marginal R2 and the conditional R2. According to AIC and to both the Marginal and Conditional R2, the best results were obtained when the regression parameter was the mean EC estimated over the 5-day period.