Milk and meat withholds are generally setup within protocols with the antibiotics. Milk and Meat withholds are generally setup to occur the number of days on treatment plus the withdrawal. Withhold Milk and Meat Hold are special chores that get recorded no matter what.

Because of the responsibility associated with administration of antibiotic we recommend only one protocol for each combination of antibiotic and duration used on the farm. This allows for easier administration and support of these protocols. Specific diagnosis criteria can be added under each of these antibiotic protocols to limit when they're available as choices for technicians after a diagnosis event is recorded. We recommend that supportive treatments be given in separate protocols or treatments if there is different changes.

There are three Meat hold items:

MeatHold- True/False for active meat hold.

MeatDt- active meat hold

MEATDate- last meat hold date completed. This doesn't include active meat hold dates.

There are three Milk hold items:

By default Milk holds will stay in place until cleared. It is possible to setup a protocol to Clear Milk Withhold Chores with Protocol or Milk Withhold Event (bovisync.com)

Example dairy keeping separate antibiotic and supportive protocols. Note the withhold information in Info column. https://bovisync.farm/protocol/

Creating new protocols is easy.  At the bottom of the protocol list there is a button to either create or copy the BoviSync library or another farm.

Here is the Excede Protocol after it is imported:

1. Set the manual enrollments for the health events you use this treatment with, in this example only metritis.
   
2. Note the auto event box checked on the Excede treatment.
   
3. Then verify the meat and milk hold, in this case 13 days meat. Which corresponds to day 14 after treatment on day 1.
   
4. Check if the animal should go to a particular pen, not applicable in this protocol.
   

1. Set the manual enrollments for the health events you use this treatment with, in this example all surgeries or when there is a diagnosis for pneumonia or metritis.
   
2. Note the auto event box checked on the day 1 events.
   
3. Then verify the meat and milk hold, in this case 6 days meat. Which corresponds to day 9 after treatment on day 3. Milk is a 2 day withhold.
   
4. Check if the animal should go to a particular pen, at this farm the animals get moved to 117 in this protocol.
   

 

Special Case- Dry Off:

Sometimes we will create chores that are to be completed in the future with a withhold. A great example is a dry cow treatment. We will assign a dry cow chore based on the farm criteria but we don't want to complete it until the dryoff occurs. Generally speaking we've created separate protocols to assign milk and meat withholds in this special case.

 

Things to avoid

 

Occasionally we've encountered users wanting to create protocols that encompass each scenario possible on a dairy. The main goal in many of these farms is to have a menu of buttons on the app do multiple things. In the worst case scenario multiple antibiotic protocols for the same diagnosis are combined with multiple supportives protocols resulting in a multiplication of protocols making maintenance and troubleshooting difficult. We recommend that a diagnosis is made, an antibiotic protocol is selected if necessary (the shorter the list of choices the better), and supportives are given/or entered as separate protocols. On multiple day treatments this might mean that if the farm wants the tech to decide whether or not to give supportives on subsequent days that they have to go to the enter menu to select the supportives.

 

In this example there are 10 antibiotic protocols when 3 would have worked. All the durations for Excenel are the same. It is recommended to only have 1 protocol would have the Excenel treatment. It is far simpler to manage.