Home Made Teat Dip

[mydakota]

I am interested in seeing how you all make your home made teat dip for when you milk your goats. I want to start making my own, but don't want to use just bleach water. That seems like it would be too drying for the goat girls. I don't want to cause any discomfort. How do you make yours?

 

[savingdogs]

I don't use teat dip, but I was using the bleach water for a dip at first and it wasn't drying, they were doing fine with it. You want the bleach watered WAAAAY down, there is a ratio at the FiasCo Farms site that I was using.

 

[lorihadams]

Okay, so here's mine. I use 1 cup of water, about 1/2 teaspoon of bleach, 3 drops of tea tree oil (which I will replace with grapefruit seed extract when I can get it), and 2 drops of eucalyptus essential oil.

I put mine in a spray bottle and shake it up and spray the teats until they drip cause my doe likes to kick the cup of dip across the room . I make a new batch every 4-6 days. I wash with soap and hot water and a fresh washcloth before every milking and then spray the teat afterwards. I just use a small spray bottle that I got from the dollar store.

 

[Henrietta23]

I use the Fiasco Farm proportions too and have had no problems with drying.

 

[noobiechickenlady]

Fiasco farms recipe here too. It was a tiny bit drying, but on Freemotions advice I started rubbing a bit of her milk onto her teats. Just like nursing mothers are told to use their own milk for dry nipples. It worked great.

 

[miss_thenorth]

I don't measure. I use about a cup of wter, a drop of bleach and a drop of dish soap. I dip the teats into the mixture, then put a cloth in the mixture, and wipe down the rest of her udder and belly, so as to get rid of loose hairs. After milking, I rub smoe milk on her teats and udder. Wehen I first got her, I thought she had a staph infection, since she had pimples on her udder. After rubbing milk on her after a few days, the pimples went a way and haven't come back.

I didn't know Free did that too. I started putting milk on her udder b/c that is what I was told to do when I was breast feeding my kiddos. I figured it would b eht esame for goats. She has nice soft teats. Works great.

 

[freemotion]

I just dip the very tips of the teats, too. Mya has taken to kicking the cup out of my hands this season, so I use the horse handling trick of picking up a front foot so she can't get any power behind those kicks. I still have to be quick, though.

 

[mydakota]

I guess I was just worried about the bleach being drying because it seems to be to my own hands. I use bleach to sanitize my milk bucket, and I always need lotion after I wash it. I use it quite a bit stronger though. I have a fairly small sink, and use probably half a cup in the water. Now that I am milking 4 does, it just seems like I am going through so many wipes. There has to be a better way.


What do the grapeseed oil and eucalyptus oil do? Are they antiseptic? Or just smell nice? Or skin conditioning?

 

[savingdogs]

Making it stronger is probably making it more drying, if you asked me to guess.

 

[mydakota]

I used to work for nutrition services in our local school district. That was how strong we were taught it was supposed to be in order to be effective. We had these little paper test strips, and if it wasn't strong enough it wouldn't turn the right color. I want it to be strong enough to kill the bad stuff. But when I do that, it seems to dry the skin. I just don't want to set them up for dry, cracked, painful teats.