Pat yourselves on the back – together, Anexa Vets and our farmers have reduced the amount of antimicrobials used on farms, especially those all-important ‘red dot’ antibiotics!

This is great news because it helps slow the development of antibiotic resistance, ensuring we have effective and available antibiotics, all while reducing your treatment costs.

If you think about this a bit more, it may prompt you to ask:

• How much antibiotic is too much?
• How much antibiotics do I use on my farm? And why are they used?
• How does this compare with other farms in the area?

Trust us—we’ve had these questions, too. That’s why this year’s milk quality consult includes a new section with easy-to-read graphs demonstrating your antimicrobial usage. During your Milk Quality Consult with your vet, you can compare the amount of antibiotics used on your farm with those used by all Anexa herds. It’s a great opportunity to celebrate good results and identify areas that would benefit from improvement, allowing you and your vet to formulate plans to tackle any issues over the coming season.

The graphs use a traffic light system to indicate usage across a range of antimicrobials on your farm. They include total antimicrobial usage, critically important antimicrobials (the ‘red dot’ drugs), mastitis treatments, dry cow therapy, and endometritis (metrichecked ‘dirty cows’) over a 12-month period.

We have also included 3-monthly graphs of mastitis treatments (tubes) to make it easier to see the seasonality of any mastitis issues.

If you haven’t booked your milk quality consult yet, get in touch with your local clinic.