Somatic cell count of milk from different goat breeds

There is no standard limit value for somatic cell count (SCC) of raw goat milk in the EU despite that excellent hygienic quality milk is needed for the manufacture of fermented milk products or cheese varieties. Mastitis often results such high SCC - besides the potential risk for humans - that the clotting of milk will not be perfect, resulting slack curd with higher whey releasing; furthermore, wrong structure, ripening, bad sensory properties of cheese can also be its consequences. In this paper, we report the SCC of milk samples from five different goat breeds bred in Hungary, measured with two fast methods compared with the results from the reference method. Furthermore, we investigated the applicability and the accuracy of the MT-02 (Agro Legato Ltd., Hungary) instrument. We determined that the White Side test and the instrument MT were suitable for the estimation of possible risks and consequences in the case of the use of high SCC milk before production. The general summarized average milk SCC was 6.64 × 10⁵ ml⁻¹. The highest difference between the results from MT-02 and the fluorometric (reference) method was 5 × 10⁵ ml⁻¹, but it was a singular, extreme value. The r² of the calculated linear calibration equation was 0.7819; consequently, this method seems to be applicable in the measurement of SCC with MT-02 instrument. Furthermore, the SCC of samples did not differ significantly by genotypes and by seasons (spring: 5.85 × 10⁵ ml⁻¹, autumn: 6.22 × 10⁵ ml⁻¹).