Milk Quality & Udder Health
Components
Recorded with DHIA tests or on their own:
- Butterfat % — drives cheese yield and flavour; Nigerian Dwarfs are known for it
- Protein % — the other half of cheese yield
- Lactose %
- Total solids
- Somatic cell count (SCC)
SCC in Goats Is Not SCC in Cows
This is the one worth understanding properly. Goats secrete milk apocrine-style, which sheds cell fragments into normal, healthy milk. Goat SCC therefore runs naturally higher than cattle, and it rises with stage of lactation, heat, and oestrus without any infection present.
Applying a dairy-cow threshold to goat milk will have you treating healthy does.
What matters is the trend and the individual. A doe whose SCC climbs against her own baseline is telling you something; a single high figure on a hot day in late lactation often isn't. See Understanding Goat SCC.
CMT and Cultures
Beyond lab numbers, you can record CMT (California Mastitis Test) results and bacterial cultures per doe, which is what turns "something's off" into a specific organism and a targeted treatment.
Recent CMT and culture results surface alongside the doe's udder health picture.
Cultures matter because organisms differ in what they respond to, and guessing wastes the window when treatment works best. Any treatment carries a milk withdrawal period — the app will track it, and warn you if you log milk from a doe still inside one.