cow pus, it does a body good.

So, there is some discussion in America right now about lowering the somatic cell limit. (Somatic cell count - SCC - is a count of how many white blood cells are in a milliliter of milk. A count of less than 200,000 is thought to indicate a healthy cow, although counts can be quite low - 10-50,000. Counts higher than 250,000 probably indicate that there is probably some sort of infection going on.) The current limit is 750,000 which is, like, really fucking high, in my opinion. If your tank of milk is averaging that you have some serious mastitis going on in multiple animals. 750,000 is the American limit because science has concluded that this is highest amount of cow pus that humans can safely consume with no chance of ill effects.

In Europe the limit is 400,000 and now those socialist bastards have the gall to want to require that any milk products the US exports to Europe meet that standard. Don't they remember we saved them from the Nazis? Now the US dairy industry is considering the idea of lowering the US limit to 400,000 to comply with the European policy. This is causing some farmers and dairy pundits (is there even such a thing?) to flip out and say that farms are going to go out of business because they can't meet the 400,000 limit.

I don't know how people figure this stuff out, but some studies say that at 400,000 12% of the quarters (teats) on a farm are infected with mastitis. 750,000 is more like 25%. The idea that 25% of your cows quarters are infected doesn't speak well for a farm's cleanliness, monitoring or treatment procedures (again, in my opinion). Keep in mind that if a cow has a really bad case of mastitis, the milk will be withheld from the tank. So these numbers don't even count cows that are deemed "sick".

While I don't like to think about farms going out of business because of this (and really, you get lots of help from the department of ag and chances to fix this sort of problem - it's not like you have one high count and the state comes and takes your license away) i have the question the quality of work being done and the quality of life for cows at farms with cell count problems.

Another issue related to cell count is production and profit. A sick animal is not going to make as much milk as a healthy one. The amount is quite a bit - something like between 6-10% of potential production is lost as an cow' s SCC starts to get above 300,000. Treating a sick animals costs money - the sicker they are the more it costs. If your farm ships to a larger processing facility, there is often a premium paid for low SCC milk.

I think the US should definitely drop the limit to 400,000. It encourages better farming practices, makes cows more efficient and allows for US dairy exports to Europe.

This is a good article from the University of Wisconsin, Madison with more specific health and economic information about somatic cell counts.

If this sort of thing really trips your trigger, you can google "milk production scc" or "400000 scc europe" and read all sorts of articles about it.