ShutOut® helps manage mastitis, reducing antibiotic usage & save money.

ShutOut helped Lucas Beeler’ achieve his Dry Cow Therapy Goal:
Reducing unnecessary antibiotic usage and save money without risking
mastitis. As a sharemilker on their family farm in Northland, managing a
250 Kiwi Cross herd, Lucas Beeler can’t emphasise enough how using
ShutOut has transformed their dry cow regimen.

Upon taking over the farm 3 years ago, they were using blanket antibiotic
dry cow treatment without an Internal Teat Sealant (ITS). Lucas had used
ITS‘s previously on farms he had managed. “I wanted to show how using
ShutOut with selective dry cow treatment, would reduce unnecessary
antibiotic usage and save money without risking mastitis” says Lucas.

With the recommendation from the local vet, ShutOut was added to their dry cow treatment options as they moved to a selective antibiotic dry cow therapy approach.
The first season after implementing ShutOut Lucas said, “the results have been exceptional, the reduction in clinical and subclinical mastitis cases at calving has been remarkable, we only saw 1 or 2 cows with clinical mastitis and 3 to 4 with subclinical mastitis”. The following season, they didn’t have a single cow come in with clinical mastitis at calving and only one had subclinical mastitis.

Administering the dry cow treatments is a meticulous process, but one that Lucas believes is vital. The motto, ‘do it once, do it right,’ guides his approach to ensure that each cow receives the proper care. He believes “Having a great dry off all begins with the lead up to dry off, you don’t want them cranking at the day of dry off”. He milks twice a-day until around Christmas time, then goes to 16 hourly or once-a-day (OAD) milking up to the last two weeks before dry off. “You need to have them on clean pasture before dry off, not a feed pad and after administering dry cow, let them walk back out to a clean paddock”. Lucas checks them daily for a couple of weeks to make sure there are no issues.

When asked how using ShutOut compared to previous ITS’s he had used, Lucas said, “ShutOut was far easier to squeeze out when putting it into the teats.” He simply takes the top off and uses the partial insertion tip, as he knows that over-insertion can cause damage to the teat canal. He was pleasantly surprised to find that ShutOut was still in the teats when he was stripping the cows out at their first milking, as previous experience with other ITS’s often resulted in very little or nothing present at that time.Having now used ShutOut for a couple of seasons, and seeing consistently low SCC, Lucas would “100% recommend using ShutOut”.