The Canadian National Dairy Study 2015—Adoption of milking practices in Canadian dairy herds
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Several studies have investigated which management practices have the greatest effect on udder health, but little information is available on how broadly the recommended milking practices are adopted across Canada. The National Dairy Study 2015 was designed to gather dairy cattle health and management data on dairy farms across Canada. The objectives of the present study were to describe the current proportions of adoption of milking practices on Canadian dairy farms, and identify factors associated with their use on farms. A bilingual questionnaire measuring use of various practices, including an udder health-specific section, was developed and sent to all Canadian dairy farms. The questions in the udder health section of the questionnaire were adapted from a bilingual questionnaire previously validated and containing questions regarding general milking hygiene and routine, and on-farm mastitis management. Chi-squared tests were used to investigate simple associations between adoption of practices and various explanatory variables including region, milking system, herd size, and bulk tank somatic cell count. In total, 1,373 dairy producers completed the survey. The regional distribution of the participants was representative of the Canadian dairy farm population, and milk quality was, on average, similar to nonparticipants. Overall, Canadian dairy producers followed the recommendations for milking procedures, but some were more extensively used than others. Fore-stripping, cleaning teats, wiping teats dry, using single-cow towels, and use of postmilking teat disinfectant were widely adopted. Use of gloves and glove hygiene, use of a premilking teat disinfectant, and use of automatic takeoffs were not as extensively implemented. Adoption percentages for several practices, including use of gloves, use of a premilking teat disinfectant, teat drying methods, and use of automatic takeoffs were significantly associated with milking system, herd size, and region. It would be helpful to explore the reasons why producers choose to adopt or ignore recommended milking practices as most are easy to include in the routine and are fairly inexpensive.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".