Somatic Cell Count Analyzer

Milk loss is only counted for the portion of Linear Score above 2, and each point above that costs an estimated 2% of daily production. At Linear Score 5, the excess is 3 points (5 minus 2), so 3 × 2% = 6% of daily milk is estimated lost per cow, scaled by your entered average daily production and annualized across a 305-day lactation.

Linear Score is computed as log2(SCC / 100,000) + 3, the National Mastitis Council's standardized base-2 logarithmic transform, designed specifically so that every doubling of raw SCC adds exactly one point to the score. This keeps the scale usable — an SCC of 100,000 sits at Linear Score 3, 200,000 at Linear Score 4, 400,000 at Linear Score 5, and so on — since raw SCC values can range from tens of thousands to millions and are otherwise hard to compare at a glance.

Quality grade is bucketed directly from raw SCC (excellent at or below 200,000; good up to 400,000; fair up to the 750,000 cells/mL ceiling set by the FDA/NCIMS Grade A Pasteurized Milk Ordinance; poor above that) and is meant as a quick, regulation-aligned label. Linear Score exists alongside it because it's the metric that's actually useful for tracking gradual trends and doing milk-loss math — a jump from Linear Score 3 to 4 (doubling SCC) might not cross a quality-grade boundary at all, so the two outputs answer different questions.

No — the meets-threshold output only compares your entered SCC against your entered quality threshold (often tied to a premium payment cutoff), while the milk-loss estimate is driven entirely by Linear Score once it exceeds 2 (about 50,000 cells/mL). A herd can comfortably meet a 400,000 threshold and still show a nonzero estimated milk loss, since the loss calculation kicks in at a much lower SCC than most cooperative thresholds.