Ontario dairy industry reduces SCC limits

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

by SUSAN MANN

The Ontario Farm Products Marketing Commission has approved a change to the somatic cell count standard for the province’s dairy farms.

The change is being implemented after delegates at the Dairy Farmers of Canada annual policy conference in February 2007 agreed the Canadian somatic cell count standard should be set at 400,000 cells per millilitre. The current standard in Ontario is 500,000 cells per millilitre.

Effective Aug. 1, the somatic cell count standard in Ontario Milk Act regulation 761 will adopt the national standard. Farmers were sent letters April 24 informing them the commission approved the new standard.

Bill Mitchell, Dairy Farmers of Ontario assistant communications director, says the organization has been consulting, making decisions and communicating the change for a long time.  Currently “what’s being done is some of the final steps in communications to make sure that people both understand the timing and the implications of the change. It’s a reminder.”
   
The change could result in a dramatic increase in the number of farmers in the penalty range. In a DFO operations report, released as part of the spring policy conference held March 20 to 22 in Alliston, the organization says it advised farmers in December 2011 if they were at a high, medium or low risk of incurring a penalty under the new standard. If farmers in the high-risk category don’t take action, it’s forecast that first level penalties will increase to more than 800 from 137, the number it was in 2011. The number of shut offs could increase to more than 40 from the current number of seven.

The somatic cell count penalty program won’t change. A farmer will be subject to a somatic cell count penalty if the monthly-weighted average somatic cell count test is equal to or greater than the limit set in the regulation for the current or most recently completed month and in two out of the three previous months. The penalty rates are $3, $4 and $5 per hectolitre for the first, second, third and subsequent penalties in a rolling 12-month period. Shut off from the milk market happens if a farmer incurs four somatic cell count penalties in any rolling 12-month period.

Farmers in the high-risk category will continue receiving information about somatic cell count management and penalty risk, the operations report says.

Somatic cells are white blood cells and epithelial cells commonly found at low levels in milk, it says in DFO’s Raw Milk Quality Program Policies booklet. When bacteria are present in the udder, cows produce somatic cells to combat the intramammary bacterial infection called mastitis. High levels of somatic cells in milk indicate abnormal, reduced milk quality. BF