Duration: 2026-2028
Staff involved: Beat Thomann and Nicole Klopfenstein
In Switzerland, milk from every dairy farm is tested regularly for udder health, using the somatic cell count (SCC) of the delivered bulk tank milk. Beyond the official regulatory limits, the dairy industry rewards particularly low cell counts with a quality premium, granted when SCC stays below 100,000 cells/ml. A low SCC signals good udder health, but keeping cell counts this low may create an incentive to treat cows more often. It remains unclear whether these financial incentives unintentionally encourage antimicrobial use, and how well the bulk tank SCC actually reflects the true average SCC of the herd. This project addresses these gaps by combining herd-level SCC data with antimicrobial use records from Swiss dairy farms. It evaluates how reliably the bulk tank milk SCC represents the herd average, examines the association between SCC and intramammary antibiotic use, and assesses whether farms approaching the premium threshold increase treatments to protect their eligibility. Views on possible adjustments to the current thresholds are gathered through consultation with stakeholders from the dairy sector.
