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Thanks to the journalist who accepted to be the moderator in this meeting and thanks to all of you, your presence is very important.

Ozolea is a scientific reality. We have been working at this project for almost 15 years: we chose to show up on the market with a commercial product three years ago, at the beginning of 2016, and we did it because some farmers who experimented our product with us and with professor Cremonesi during Dr. Andrea Bignotti’s doctorate thesis, were insistently asking for the components of our products. They used to say “at least the simplest” and the simplest was this “bioengineered” oil, as we use to call it, because we modify the oil structure and we made possible that this oil gains particular characteristics, among which the absence of pharmacological and metabolic activity, for the reasons already explained.

In this context we decided to take on the market to give the farmers an harmless tool. But we’ll get here. On this occasion I would like to present you the project SSafeMILK that we are launching these days at our exhibition stand and awarding 50 paragon farms that through these three years reduced the use of antibiotics: you can tell from the veterinary medicine registries, the number of animals on farm has nor decreased but the overall quantity of intra-mammary antibiotics purchased and registered did.

The product itself was not sufficient: it took a great ability on the farmer’s part to know how to use it, how to apply it. This is not a commercial experience tied to just one product, but it’s an experience of a farming model. Without this ability of the farmer it is not possible to reach a null or closed to zero antibiotic resistance result as defined according to the resistome project. The farm presented earlier is a farm that has been using Ozolea-Mast both in lactation and dry for the past 3 years.

For this farm it hasn’t been easy to start this path: there were many doubts and many linked to the costs because the approach mentality to the farm that needs to change, and it is necessary to reconsider the numbers upon the results, which are not just the results within the farm but results considered within all the production chain and therefore promoted.

And it’s for this that we launched the project SSafeMILK.
The project SSafeMILK is most of all a food safety project. It’s a food safety project not according to the parameters set by the law today, because this is law and it cannot be the reference for the future. The reference for the future is the scientific research, the scientific avantgard puts us in the conditions to have new instruments. Are all of them reliable? We will find out together.
We cannot say we have an univocal scientific solution in our pocket, that puts us in the condition not to listen to all the rest.

It’s an economic sustainability project: the farmer must be helped to do the math in a correct way, to find those margins, and we are convinced there still are many, of savings, waste reduction, that create distortions throughout the whole production chain.
It’s an environmental sustainability project, because, making it easier, when we say “we reduce the waste” it means we are going to improve the resources use parameters in comparison with the milk produced and saleable.

It’s a project of fight against the antibiotic resistance, not in a way that makes a flag of it for marketing reasons: it is needed an honest information on that antibiotic resistance so deeply modified in the latest years by an aggressive chemistry, leaving alone the natural antibiotic resistance that is part of a biological process.
Therefore it is a project of social responsibility mostly. It is a project of social responsibility on the whole production chain.

I was smiling earlier when Ms. Faenza was talking about the article from the 80’s. I was very young but I do remember some topics discussed at home: my father sue and won against a feeding industry giant because there were anabolic steroids in their feeds for the calves growth. We won the lawsuit and the reasons were correctly presented also by the defendants, but however my father was not selling to the final consumer, and the fact that this wasn’t our core business but a side sale compared to the rest of the business, this sense of having betrayed the consumer that he did not see in the face because he was selling to a merchant, and there was a production chain before getting to the person that would have eaten that steak, and I remember this sense of having betrayed the consumer as a failure. This sense of failure belongs to the production chain, not to the single individual, it’s also who sold that feed, who formulated it, it belongs to everyone and leads to negative results that sooner or later will harm everyone, also the satellite activities, also who is behind, also who makes the bolt of the feed mixer.

I insist on this idea because it is the whole production chain that profits form the milk production: maybe it’s the case not to point the finger or saying it’s someone’s fault, maybe it’s best to work together towards a solution.
This is what this project SSafeMILK wants to be. Today it isn’t a predefined project: we are building it together, also based on the needs of all the players involved in the production chain.
Someone in this room and many outside know that Ozolea during these years truly phone called the world: we called everybody, we built a network, someone was bothered because it wasn’t clear that Ozolea comes form a scientific reality and we looked like those who sell the latest product, it didn’t looked like something so well structured.

But we gathered a considerable amount of information, we collected the needs of this production chain, we collected the worries of veterinarians, who are requested to adopt protocols of antibiotic reduction in farms and must find alternatives: they cannot be left alone looking for alternatives, that cannot be the usual “fresh water”, but it must be something effective and conveyable to the farmer, because the collaboration with the farmer is essential.

We tried to involve pharmaceutical industries: many did not listen to our invite, other listened but nothing more than that, but maybe there are still some possibilities to work together. These have a fundamental role: it was reminded this morning at the conference AISA that the pharmaceutical industry needs to have a market guaranteed so that to have margins that permit the research; we depend on a research that must continue and with the right funds. Maybe all the participants somehow owe their life to a medicine or an antibiotic, that if didn’t exist we would be mush less in this room. Therefore we kept into consideration the pharmaceutical industries even though someone dare to tell us that we break the market: we don’t break the market, on the contrary, we want pharmaceutical industries to maintain their financial volumes with less volumes in term of kg of medication spread out.

We involved the pharmacists, because on the market we find many products liberally sold that it is not clear how they are classified. And for this reason we did our researches, and what is available is decree 193/2006 (ed. directive 2004/28/CE), we read it word by word, we studied it, we verified with reliable sources, not local interpretations as unfortunately other people did and who influenced them.

Obviously we involved the farmers, or better we are going to award them in these days because the award we want to give them is a social responsibility achievement, because they understood the model, they understood where they benefit using a product like Ozolea-Mast for the antibiotic use reduction. Someone wanted to eliminate completely the use of antibiotics, but if it was really necessary they would buy it instantly on the vet’s recommendation: we don’t intervene in the disease concept, but we try to make possible that the animal maintains a welfare condition, that does not get a disease, as far as possible.

We tried to involve the dairy industry, and shortly we’ll see why.
And last, we care about the consumers needs: we are consumers ourselves, we are people with the society macro-needs, including environmental needs, that for me are also a sort of professional deformation and it is a theme particularly dear to me.

We contacted then everybody, and collecting the various needs we arrived on the market with these two solutions, two apparently simple products, but which are not the cornerstone of the project: the cornerstone of the project is the protocol, and the farmer’s activity who needs to learn how to better manage the welfare status of his animals. We do it giving it a name: we called it SSafeMILK and now I am going to explain you what is the project SSafeMILK, that is what we are going to do because we consider this a starting point and let’s see together what we want to implement in the next few months in order to have a better expendable result in a timeframe of 12 months maximum, hypothetically.

SSafeMILK project is based on a demonstrative project that consists in 3 panels:
– Health and welfare, where we talk about parameters that go beyond what is defined today as health and welfare, therefore we will keep into consideration the preliminary study presented by professor Bonizzi, and we will conduct a study on large scale. We needed a preliminary study to earn interest, and we’ll see if this will be the case, public funds to validate this system and collect valuable and expendable results. We will conduct a study linked to pharmadynamics, more for investigative desire because as we’ve seen we don’t have a pharmaceutical action, but we do it to grant the institutions, and moreover EU institutions, numbers with which doing the correct and relevant evaluations, most of all to push for the issuance of this regulation on the veterinary medical device, in which our products today would be placed if there was the law.

We do it to collect clinic parameters to define the best animal welfare: this morning at the meeting I was referring to they were saying that the perceived quality of an aliment is first of all its food safety, secondly where it comes from, and how healthy are the animals that produced it, and third it’s actual goodness. There, we want to collect welfare parameters that go beyond what has been done until now and clearly we open our collaboration to those who have good ideas and we widen our work groups just for our scientific nature.

– We will also evaluate the food safety and suitability: here we want to involve the dairy transformation industry, not only for parameters linked to milk for human consumption but also for parameters linked to fresh cheeses, average and aged. We will perform analysis in collaboration with the transformation industry because the transformation industry received lately milk that sometimes did not have those characteristics necessary for the transformation that should instead be guaranteed, to discover later that the farmer used new medicines, or new products that, although absolutely legal, apparently shouldn’t have left any trace but actually inhibit certain types of transformation.
Therefore, to avoid getting to this point, having wasted so much time, so much money, such great effort, according to a purely financial calculation but that clearly has its effects also on the environment, and has a social cost, we propose to analyse this first, to build together the protocol, to evaluate together these parameters to stop those solutions that may not work for somebody. We want a solution that could work for all the production chain players. In this terms I think as an engineer and I say: let’s systematize this, it will be more difficult and require more collaboration to get to a solution, but if we get there together we will obtain a solution that will allow to resolve more cases and stay more efficiently on the market.

– And we want to do an environmental evaluation: we do it both on the product Ozolea, where we have only one ingredient which is vegetable oil suitable for human consumption, although with particular characteristic. We do it because we want to reduce the environmental impact of the product itself: this is just the beginning and there will be an evolution, which is almost ready but we are in a path that allows us to be particularly suitable for the needs of today’s society. But we want to perform and environmental impact evaluation according to these new parameters also of the farming model: we will check how much CO2 has been saved by the farmers who used a certain number of Ozolea-Mast or Ozolea-Metr applications instead of other products, how the resources were managed, after all an animal has its own environmental impact and if I optimize its production I obtain a particularly positive balance.

And then what do we do with all this data, all this information that we built? We build a standard, a certifying model that is directly expendable to the consumer.

I am going to present you a small sample of out sustainability chart: it’s the sustainability chart of Ozolea-Mast but it can be perfectly applied also to other protocols.

The farmer convenience is an immediate convenience, because the farmer does not discard the milk in the days when the product is administered, therefore I optimize at least its financial balance. Then there is a convenience in lactation: an antibiotic has the respectable effect to kill the pathogens and it’s an emergency solution: if I want to support the tissue functionality I need to intervene before the emergency.
If I kill the pathogen and I don’t do anything to support the tissue functionality in that difficult quarter I will have a decrease in the lactation curve. All the farmers say this: if a mastitis occurs on a quarter, you can save the quarter affected but the part gets wasting and it will never produce as the other three. And still that animal will eat as an animal with four quarters, and will produce greenhouse gases as an animal with 4/4. Then let’s consider: if I can support the functionality of the apparatus, even if indirectly, giving the best ingredients to the animal so that it can autonomously defend itself, then the farmer will have a much more valuable advantage, not only on this one but also on future lactations.

Ozolea-Mast has this advantage of antibiotic resistance reduction, that antibiotic resistance induced by the excessive use of medicines, because luckily antibiotic resistance is reduced with the simple reduction of antibiotic use. And this is a mechanism of which we need to take advantage now, because we don’t know how these mechanisms will evolve in the future if today we ignore them.
We are talking of less stress for the animals because we maintain a welfare situation before the outburst of a disease.
And we talk about better parameters for the evaluation of the animal welfare, as we already said.

We talked about less resources used and less greenhouse gases produced for saleable liter of milk. And finally we talk about a lower environmental antibiotic resistance: animals are in contact with the environment and when you use antibiotics on them, we were talking about the idea health-human-animal, also this morning the idea has been widely explained and I feel I want to add that sometimes we forget we are mammals and we belong to the animal kingdom.

Therefore we collected different players and player groups of the production chain to which some sections of the production chains are significantly linked to, like
– animal health and public health linked to veterinarians, pharmacists, pharmaceutical industries, or
– the idea of shared benefit between farmers and veterinarians: the idea of farm veterinarian promoted by the new program of the Ministry of Health is essential and I believe the veterinarian should be widely acknowledge in this role of protector of the public health.
– The idea of food safety, of which the dairy industry is a grantor at the eyes of the consumer.

Today we invite all these entities to show their interest: many already did it, we are collecting subscriptions to this project.
It will be a project in which who is there first, will enjoy the results first; who arrives later will simply find something done to offer to its market. For sure nobody will ignore this type of approach, be it the SSafeMILK project or another project of improvement of what is proposed to the market today.
This is the SSafeMILk project that I wanted to present to you and which I hope you will agree on.
We conclude with our usual wish “have a good milk and savory cheeses”!
I invite you to stay in touch and thank you for staying until the end.

©This work is subject to copyright and it is an exclusive property of the Author.
Please be aware that disclosure, copying, distribution or use of this document and the information contained herein is strictly prohibited unless with written authorization by the Author.
Contact Ozolea to get in touch with the Author.

Q. We’re back to the SSafeMILK interviews cycle, towards a farm with no medicines. Directly from the 73rd Cremona International Livestock Exhibition, we now finally introduce you a veterinarian, Doctor Gandolfi, who owns a farm and delivers milk for organic Grana Padano in Piacenza. Hello, we ask you to tell us about your farm and how it is organized.
A. We have a dairy farm, we deliver our milk to a social dairy factory, we recently became “organic” and it has been for this reason that we discovered your product, and we opened up to a new horizon and a new adventure. We have 350 cows, 300 of which in lactation and 50 in dry, plus all the heifers. We had a room with a carousel, we have now been starting with the construction of a robotic milking system, so we are starting also this new adventure. Since we discovered your product we also started a project with the zooprophylactic institute of Piacenza for the control and a targeted approach for mastitis and therefore also the use of antibiotics on farm. Most of all, as far as concerns clinical mastitis, we are taking part in this project and we have the opportunity to slate testing (CMT) the milk, therefore consider the targeted use of antibiotics or not. Your product has been very useful for those uncertain moments, or for subclinical mastitis, or for the very early stages of mastitis in which we mainly use your product.
Q. To this extent, we remind that Ozolea-Mast is a non medicine veterinary product, therefore we don’t have to expect that pharmacological effect or that metabolic absorption that characterizes all those products that are in fact a medicine, and maybe also particularly effective, for example one-shot products. In fact this is a product that supports the tissue functionality, and it is necessary to be patient in getting used to it. Was it hard for you?
A. At first yes, maybe because we did not understand how to use it and our expectations did not match with the results. But that was because they did not explain us which were the steps: we were expecting a sort of homeopathic or phyto-therapic medicine, that immediately reduced the problem. We also did a mistake on the action speed: your product works really well if used in those cases in which mastitis, or the problem, is caught at the right time. If the problem is dragged around, obviously the effect is not as strong.

Q. Sure, we tried to emphasize the importance of the prompt use, encouraging the farmer not to wait the symptoms of a full-blown mastitis but to intervene on first signs of tissue unbalance. For this very reason it is important to remind that since it does not have a pharmacological effect we cannot expect a miracle product, or a miracle solution from something that does not have an active ingredient.
Basically Ozolea-Mast builds a barrier that protects the tissue and allows the tissue to have a break form the bacterial attack, a temporary relief, and facilitates the regeneration of the tissue itself. In this way, being the very same animal regenerating and rebuilding the possibility to defend itself autonomously, it is necessary to be patient and completing the eight applications cycle. Did you find other problems, other negative aspects, I don’t know can you tell me something about the costs for example? What did you think?
A. OK we have to consider that for the type of product the milk can still be sold, and on the other hand the cost of a mastitis if caught later. We need to start form an assumption: if we have a certain organization, that if I detect the problem at a later moment I still have in my hand something that helps resolving, then the medicine quality and efficiency gets lost. We need to have a good timing, good product in our hand and start from there, evaluate the mastitis to resolve the problem. If instead we keep thinking we can treat something that slipped out of hand, then it’s not OK. Your rule is correct, that is to intervene promptly on the problem: resolving the problem quickly of course I waste less milk, I waste less product, the bovine is not affected too much, and therefore we have the profit. And the animal health pays everything back.
Q. Yes, in fact to keep the animal healthy before having to manage health issues allows us to keep a high business productivity not only from a financial point of view, but also in terms of animal performance, and also, allow me, in environmental terms: we are going to have a reduced environmental impact and a productivity able to satisfy the food consumer requests, with a lower use of resources. Do you know that we are setting a SSafeMILK protocol collecting the experience of farmers who used Ozolea-Mast in these years, and are starting now to use Ozolea-Metr, our last product for intrauterine use: we are doing this because we are sure that within the production chain there are still huge externalities that need to be codified and which value must be redistributed within the production chain to the players that put that extra effort to obtain some results. Usually on the farmer’s shoulders there is the responsibility of many choices; we were saying the farmer must be an expert in everything. But you have the virtue of being a veterinarian: how are decisions taken in your farm? How did you organize the decision team on big changes, also the decision to switch to organic?

A. The decision to switch to organic was maybe originated first of all on the farming, I mean crops and the fields management. We also have biogas and we saw that we could work well also outside of traditional methods. And from there we started our path, first in the fields, then little by little we saw that an organic animal farm was feasible. We will keep the other traditional farm as is, because we also want to see the difference in the management; also if you throw yourself in an experience it becomes hard to evaluate the differences.
Q. Yes, absolutely, it’s a very methodical approach.
A. Therefore we are keeping the two farms, we are happy with both and we keep going, we never stop.
Q. And we will meet again next year, reviewing the results.
A. And I’m curious to try Ozolea-Metr.
Q. You will find Ozolea-Metr in the prize package that we prepared for you and exactly for the social responsibility benefits in the fight against antibiotic resistance, food safety, animal health and welfare, financial sustainability in the zootechnical sector with the adoption of the Ozolea-Mast protocol, today Ozolea wants to reward you with a certificate and a set of products: you will receive Ozolea-Mast and Ozolea-Metr, the new product to improve the delivery/conception rate and therefore increasingly improve the farm productivity but preserving the animal welfare, then a shared ethics.
This is our award, with the wish that this certificate, which is today a formal award, tomorrow will become an official acknowledgment, a certification that recognizes the value of your product for which you put so much effort, and that becomes really expendable towards the transformation industry that collects your milk.