Milkoscan 400 analyzer

During the suckling period, as is common for Churra sheep, ewes were machine-milked once a day at 0900 h in a 2 × 24 low-line Casse system milking parlor (Alfa-Laval Iberia, S.A., Madrid, Spain) with 12 milking units and 2 milkers during the entire experimental period. The milking machine (Alfa-Laval Iberia, S.A., Madrid, Spain) was set to provide 180 pulsations per minute in a 50:50 ratio with a vacuum level of 36 kPa.
Once a week, individual ewe milk production was recorded and samples were taken in milk collection jars. For this purpose, milk production was recorded by the oxytocin technique: in the morning, before milking, each ewe was injected with 0.35 mL of oxytocin (Oxiton, Laboratorios Ovejeros, S.A., Spain) and then immediately milked. Ewes were returned to their paddock for 6 h while the lambs were confined and were then milked again for milk sampling. One subsample of milk was kept at 4°C until analyzed for fat and pro-tein, in accordance with International Dairy Federation recommendations (IDF, 2000) , using a MilkoScan-400 analyzer (Foss Electric, Hillerød, Denmark) . Another subsample of each ewe belonging to the second and fourth week of milk sampling was stored at -80°C for subsequent fatty acid analysis.