Charm / Alta Help Dairy Farmers Improve Milk Safety

Two long-established suppliers to the North American dairy industry are teaming up to help farmers improve milk quality.

Charm Sciences Inc. (“Charm”) of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Alta Genetics Inc. (“Alta”) of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, signed a distribution agreement to provide on-farm antibiotic residue diagnostic products, service and support to dairies throughout North America and international markets. Charm / Alta’s “direct-to-farm” sales and consulting approach is a believed to be the first of its kind in North America and will offer a valued resource to both farmers and milk processors by helping strengthen their residue avoidance programs.

Charm manufactures a line of validated diagnostics for detecting antibiotic residues in milk. Products include The Charm SL™ (Safe Level) Test for Beta Lactams and similarly designed, user-friendly, one-step assays for detecting other common drug families used on most dairy farms including Tetracyclines and certain Sulfa drugs. Alta is among the fastest growing global Artificial Insemination companies, providing reproductive products and services directly to thousands of dairy farms in North America each year.

Charm and Alta’s goal is to help dairy farmers improve milk safety in two ways: a) mitigating the risk of shipping a contaminated load, and b) preventing the unnecessary dumping of "non-violative" milk by matching the on-farm test to the test used by the milk buyer. Hundreds of plants, transfer stations, and dairy cooperatives across North America have already selected Charm as their “test of choice” for screening for drug residues in milk.

85 Alta field representatives have been trained and certified as “Approved Charm Representatives” (or “ACR’s”). ACR’s will provide customers with a suite of personalized services pertaining to their on-farm testing needs.

Charm drug residue products are valuable diagnostic tools for dairy farmers to test the bulk tank prior to pick-up and to test individual cows prior to release to the milk line. Key competitive advantages of Charm products include its ease of use (one-step, “walk-away” test), fast response time (8 minutes), and close match to regulatory safe levels.

For more information, please contact:
Gerard Ruth, Vice President of Sales, Charm Sciences Inc. (email: gerardr@charm.com), or Stace Wills, Director of Business Development, Alta Genetics Inc., (Ph; 403-226-0666; email swills@altagenetics.com).

Posted Jan 7th

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