My journey with Staph A cows

My journey with Staph A cows. The two cows I’ve had so far with Staph A mastitis, what I did to treat it, and my thoughts on it.

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When I got into milk cows I quickly learned that there was something called Staph A mastitis that everyone seemed to be terrified of.

I thought “wow, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that!”

It seemed to be such a distant problem. And for over the whole first year of owning milk cows I never had to deal with mastitis period, much less Staph A mastitis.

What a blessing from God that He made the start of my milk cow journey so idyllic and amazing!

But of course, when you raise livestock, you will eventually have to deal with issues, or sickness, or death. It’s just the way it goes.

There is so much negativity out there about staph A though. It’s so depressing to try to get any advice on the Facebook cow groups, everyone says to just cull the cows immediately.

My voices of reason and mentors through this whole ordeal were Reverence Farms, and my friends Janelle and Jenesse! I literally couldn’t have survived without them! Make sure to go give them all a follow! They are some of my go-to accounts for milk cow information!

My journey with Staph A cows

*This is not intended to be treatment advice – I am merely sharing my personal journey*

Lois’ issues started well before she developed staph a. She is my cow who self nurses, which I’m suspicious that’s how she even got staph a. But anyway.

When I bought her I had been told she was due in September so I dried her off accordingly. I gave her a good 60 day dry period….or so I thought. In reality her dates were two months off.

So mid-July comes around and she had only been dried off for less than two weeks and I noticed her start to bag up again. Then I noticed her back-end area was swollen. And my friend, Kate, showed me how her pins had dropped and were totally gone. She was about to calve!

Shoot!

She had not had nearly long enough of a dry period. And that dry period is so important for their udder to heal and regenerate and stay healthy.

So it set her up to develop mastitis and have a very stunted lactation (super low milk supply).

She was only a couple weeks post-calving, and had already dealt with a different strain of mastitis and retained placenta infection. Poor girl had it so rough.

But one milking I noticed a very slight difference in her udder. Her left front quarter stayed slightly bigger than usual when we were done milking. It made a little red flag pop up in my head.

Later that day I ran a CMT test on her. It was actually my very first CMT I had ever done. I never had a reason to before now.

It was positive

The left front quarter that I was suspicious of gelled up.

I was so upset and disappointed. But at this point I didn’t even know what strain of mastitis it even was.

I treated intermammary with UdderWell herbal mastitis treatment. I also used Synergy Superior Cow Cream topically, and their Ex-cell 7000 orally.

You can use code WILSON for a small discount on Synergy products.

I sent off a milk sample through my vet to see what mastitis we were dealing with before doing anything with antibiotics.

It took almost two weeks for results to come back. It was agonizing to wait.

The whole timeline is so blurry because so much happened in a short time and it was also super upsetting. I didn’t necessarily handle the whole thing super well 😉

At this point we had also bought Penelope and brought her home. She was also in milk and the very first day we milked her the milk tasted a bit salty. So I did a CMT on her and she ALSO had her left front quarter gel. I was so bummed. Lots of hard lessons learned with her on what to look out for with shady cow sellers.

The vet finally texted me about Lois letting me know that it was staph a mastitis.

I could have cried.

I decided to run a second sample just to be sure. Staph A is everywhere all over our environment. It lives on our skin. It’s probably on your door handle or countertop right now. So it can be easy to contaminate the sample and get a false positive. I really hoped that’s what it was.

I was super careful with collecting the next sample. Plus I also collected a sterile sample from Penelope as well to see what we were dealing with.

I treated Lois with intermammary Synergy yellowjacket in the meantime. I kept using superior cow cream topically and ex-cell 7000 orally.

A lot of people told me I should pull Luna the calf and not let her nurse. They said she would spread the staph a to her other quarters. I was so close to pulling her. But I ultimately opted not to because I didn’t want to stress Lois even more than she already was.

People also told me that Luna the calf would most likely freshen with staph A mastitis because she nursed on her mom with it. But after reading on Reverence Farm’s page I’m not really worried about that. They talk about how just because it goes through their digestive tract doesn’t mean it’ll somehow magically end up in their udder. They have to have it go through the teat ends into the udder to develop it. That calves with moms that have staph A, and who nursed on their moms, could actually have antibodies against staph A. I’m choosing to believe that.

The second sample finally came back as definitely staph a.

At that point the CMT was still slightly gelling so I used Excenel antibiotic intramuscular and Amoximast antibiotic intermammary.

We started to think about what our next steps with Lois should be.

I had separated her and Luna from Penelope and Eleanor. I didn’t want any cross contamination with Penelope because at that point I didn’t know she also had staph A that she came to me with.

But the sample I sent through my vet for Penelope was positive for staph a too. I just continued to leave everyone separated though because I didn’t know what to do. I was starting to think I just shouldn’t own cows anymore. Everything seemed to be going so wrong.

It was one of those seasons of homesteading where you just felt like burning the whole farm down.

I cried many tears into buckets of milk, crouched down next to my cows, milking morning and evening. Praying that they would somehow be ok.

With Lois’ self nursing problems, nursing on Eleanor the heifer when she gets stressed out, being a low producer, and being aggressive with the kids after calving, we thought maybe we should send her to the butcher for beef.

But the longer I thought about it, it just felt so wrong to give up on her. Especially when there were some easy solutions at my fingertips.

Here’s what we decided was the plan:

• We opted to put a permanent metal nose ring pierced in her nose to keep her from self nursing. And to protect my other cows from her nursing.
• I also was going to use Chlorhexidine to kill the quarter with the staph A mastitis. She would be a 3 quartered cow then. But next lactation she should have come into full milk with the three quarters compensating for the one missing. Her production should have been just as much as it would have been otherwise. That would keep the staph A from being spread around to other quarters or cows.

But before pulling the trigger on actually killing the quarter I decided to test each individual quarter to make sure it hadn’t spread. I was worried Luna maybe had actually spread it. If it was in 2 or even 3 quarters then it wouldn’t be worth killing them all off and keeping her.

So I sent off another sterile sample.

We also sent off 4 samples from each of Penelope’s quarters too. I wanted a second test result on her staph a positive quarter and to see what was going on in the rest of them as well.

And then we waited.

I really hate waiting.

The results finally came back.

I just expected to see that each of them had one front quarter with staph a and I was praying so hard that it hadn’t spread to any of the other quarters.

But Lois was completely negative in all quarters. Even the front left that had tested positive for it twice before.

I almost fainted.

I really didn’t expect that at all!

Penelope’s one quarter still had it though. Which I knew would most likely happen because it was still gelling on the CMT too. Lois’ wasn’t anymore.

So after that we got Lois’ nose pierced with the permanent nose ring and we didn’t have to kill any quarters!

But then I had Penelope to deal with.

I decided to do yet ONE MORE sterile sample before killing her quarter as well. It’s just such a final thing to do that I couldn’t bring myself to actually commit. I just kept hearing this little voice telling me to hold off and test again.

The results came back negative.

What!?

Both of my previously staph A positive cows were now negative.

Praise God!

As soon as I got the news I put the whole herd back together and decided to stop worrying about stuff so much! People had gotten me so freaked out about this staph A mastitis and that I would have to cull my entire herd! I’m so glad I didn’t listen to the negativity!

I had ended up actually doing the exact same treatment regimen for both of them. So something in this treatment plan (or maybe it’s the combination of all of it) really helped!

Treatment plan I used:

This is not medical advice, this is just the list of things I did for both of my cows.

What I used the whole time:

• Synergy Ex-cell 7000 orally 20ml twice a day. A syringe straight in the mouth.
• Synergy Superior Cow Cream topically twice a day.

I used this at the very beginning:

• UdderWell intermammary treatment (I used the treatment instructions that come with the tubes)

Then a week or so later I used:

• Excenel intramuscular antibiotic from my vet.
• Amoximast intermammary antibiotic from my vet (there is a milk withhold period on this one).

A week or two after that they were testing negative on my CMT test.

Some thoughts

I do realize that the Staph A could always come back.

It could technically be walled off inside their udders hiding from the culture tests.

But isn’t that even more of a reason to just live your life and not worry about staph A?

To just milk your cows and enjoy the milk and your time with them, and stop fishing for problems by testing for everything under the sun.

If it can be there on one test and gone on another…who’s to say that any cow you bought with a “clean” staph A test doesn’t actually have staph A?

Reverence Farms has soooo much amazing and encouraging information out there about staph A. They actually started their herd with staph A positive cows. She has talked about how amazing it is if you have a cow that previously had staph A and her body was actually able to fight it off, what better genetics we are breeding into our herd!

Because think about it. We are never going to “get rid” of staph A.

It’s literally everywhere. So wouldn’t we rather have cows that we give a chance to, and that are healthy enough to fight it off?

Not only that, but it’s not like staph A milk is even necessarily bad to drink. Everyone needs to make their own decision on that for their family. But for us, if the milk tastes, smells and looks normal, we drink it. I wouldn’t sell milk to customers that was gelling on a CMT test, but I’m not afraid to drink it personally. And especially milk that ISN’T even gelling on a CMT but shows positive for staph A on a culture, I don’t worry about that in the slightest.

From what I’ve read, sometimes cows can have staph A really take over their udders, and they’re not able to fight it off. The milk gets to the point where its so salty and nasty that the cow’s calf won’t even nurse anymore. In that case I may kill the quarter or cull the cow. I guess I won’t know for sure until I’m in that situation though.

But for cows with mild symptoms, I wish people in the dairy world would give them a fighting chance. I wish people weren’t so afraid of staph A and other bacteria.

It’s bacteria that is in our environment and has been there a very long time.

What did we used to do before there were labs to culture the milk and see what strain of mastitis a cow had? People just treated it the best they could. If the cow appeared to recover then they didn’t worry about it (even though the staph A could have still been walled off inside the udder). If the cow wasn’t recovering then they’d probably butcher her for beef at that point. But not the very moment they found mastitis.

Staph A doesn’t have to be a death sentence for your cow.

They say that “once a staph A cow, always a staph A cow”. And I think that’s ridiculous. Because there have to be so many false positives. There just have to be! It is so easy to contaminate a sample. So if they are testing positive it may not be coming from inside the cow’s udder. It could have come from your hand!

All that rambling to say…I’m not worried about staph A.

I know I’m no expert on it at all. I haven’t even had milk cows for all that long. But this is just my story, and my experience. I hope that maybe it was helpful or encouraging for someone out there struggling with staph A mastitis in their beloved milk cow. Because it can be such a hard and lonely journey honestly.

And blesssings!

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