With antibiotic use reduction at the forefront of industry thinking, this year’s ‘Animal health workshops’ at Dairy-Tech have been created with the aim of identifying techniques for best practice to help reduce its use.

Boehringer Ingelheim, the TB Advisory Service, AHDB and NMR will all present as part of the workshops – which will be on stand P7 at the event which is being held at Stoneleigh Park, on Wednesday, February 5.

At the event, the company’s #Calfmatters team will be working with British Touring car driver, Tom Oliphant, to launch the 2020 focus on fine tuning calf rearing. The will involve working with farmers and vets to discuss continual series of small changes on farm.

Learning from the expertise harnessed in motorsport – optimising quality and efficiency and minimising variation in daily tasks – the session, an open discussion, will examine what systems are in place in the early life of a calf and explain the ‘Kaizen’ theory.

In the same seminar, if you want to know how milk recording can help identify signs of stress, disease and hunger in dairy cows, then NMR will be using its workshop to launch its ‘HappyMoo’ project. This is designed to identify signs of hunger, stress and disease from monthly DHI milk samples.

Also, Sarah Tomlinson, from the TB Advisory Service, will advise on how you can identify TB risks and protect your business from the impact of a breakdown. This will include which parts of your business would be affected by a TB breakdown, what you can do to reduce those impacts, what extra costs would be involved and what long term solutions can help build resilience into your business.

The session will be interactive with plenty of chance for discussion to ensure maximum knowledge transfer.

AHDB’s workshop will see Dr James Breen discuss QuarterPRO – a new initiative to drive continuous improvement in mastitis control and udder health on farm.