A New, Practical Animal Welfare Assessment for Dairy Farmers

Simple Summary To determine the level of welfare on a dairy farm is a complex task. There is no protocol available that can serve as a 'gold standard'. The Welfare Quality protocol is the most extensive one, but it takes about a full day to perform. We, therefore, examined if it would be possible to replace the time-consuming parts, like lengthy behavioural observations, with simple measurements in the environment. This resulted in a new Welfare Monitor that can be executed in 1.5 h on a farm with 100 cows. Welfare assessment was appreciated by the farmers, and they responded to advice for improvements on their farm. Besides promoting better welfare, this approach also led to a better financial result for the farms. The Welfare Quality(R) assessment protocol (WQ) is the most extensive way to measure animal welfare. This study was set up to determine if resource-based welfare indicators, that are easier and faster to measure, could replace the more time consuming, animal-based measurements of the WQ. The WQ was applied on 60 dairy farms in the Netherlands, with good, moderate and poor welfare. The WQ protocol classified most farms (87%) as 'acceptable'. Several of the animal-based measures of WQ correlated well with measures in the environment. Using these correlations, an alternative welfare assessment protocol (new Welfare Monitor) was designed, which takes approximately 1.5 h for a farm with 100 dairy cows. Because the opinion of farmers about welfare assessment is important if one wants to improve conditions for the cows at a farm, another objective of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of the new Welfare Monitor for the farmer. Over two years, the farms were visited, and advice was given to improve the conditions at the farm. After the first welfare assessment and advice, farmers improved the conditions for their cows substantially. Farms where the category score had increased made more improvements on average than those that did not upgrade.