Milkrite, a division of Avon Rubber and Plastics, is the world’s largest provider of dairy rubber wear, with their core business focused on creating rubber liners used in milking machines. We reached out to Tom Votny, a representative of Milkrite. During our conversation, we learned about the current state of the milking machine market, what technologies have already been developed for milking shells and milking machine liners, how products are typically tested, and how large companies conduct their market research. These insights showed the product development team that their ideas for the milking shell were feasible and alerted them to the other considerations they would have to make in their design. We also learned that farmer feedback is absolutely essential to ensuring that our project as a whole succeeds in the market. We began contacting as many farms as we could to gather that feedback.

Nearly two months after our first visit with Daryl Nydam of Quality Milk Production Services, we decided to talk to him again now that our ideas were more fleshed out. We talked to him about the progress of our bacteriocin research, and Dr. Nydam lent us a field guide for mastitis that gave us a solid foundation of how we should move forward with bacteriocin testing. He also agreed to provide us with infected milk samples that we could use as test targets, and genomic preps of Lactococcus lactis and Bacillus subtilis, two promising bacteriocins that required genes too large to synthesize.

We then spoke to Dr. Nydam about the milking shell that we were developing for the milking machine to aid in the prevention of the disease. He particularly liked the iodine spray, UV light, and cold shock modules. He thought the idea of the cold shock was extremely innovative, but suggested that we talk to more experts to discover if physiologically it would work. No research seems to have been done on the temperature that would be required to achieve the cold shock.

We also spoke to Dr. Nydam about our ideas for the app. He recommended some academic literature that would help us with the economic analysis of treating or culling a cow. He was fascinated by the somatic cell counter and urged us to further pursue that option. While there are tests like the California Mastitis Test that already allow farmers to quickly detect mastitis, this new innovation could change the way the disease is approached and dealt with by farmers.

Dr. Nydam praised us for choosing a project in the dairy industry because of the strong agricultural presence in New York, along with the connections that Cornell has. Overall, Dr. Nydam emphasized something that everyone we have met has said: farmers want ease and effectiveness. Throughout the rest of the creation process, we kept that in mind through the rest of our project.

We were thrilled to schedule our next farm visit to Scipio Springs Dairy in Scipio Center, NY because it was very different from the previous two farms that we had visited. Scipio Springs Dairy is a much larger farm with 800 cows and is set up like a traditional milking parlor, with 12 cows in parallel with one another. We met with Bill Morgan, who looks over the operations of the dairy farm, and the herd manager of the farm, allowing us to get a more well-rounded feedback on our wet lab, product development, and app components of our project. Bill was extremely interested in implementing bacteriocins on his farm instead of using traditional antibiotics. He was impressed by our modular idea for the shell because he believed that it was an all-encompassing prevention to mastitis. Bill believed that the UV light would be a great alternative to the traditional use of heat because heat changes the functionality of the proteins in the milk as well as the milk’s flavor. He also liked the idea of the temperature sensor because gram negative bacteria mastitis typically causes an increase in temperature. Using a temperature sensor would be better than the conventional way of finding out that the mastitis is caused by gram negative bacteria visually because by the time the cause is found, the damage to the cow and its milk is already done. Overall, Bill Morgan was supportive of our idea, and was interested in trying out our prototype and app once we finalized them.