OK, thank you, Karen, and, good afternoon, everyone. I'm really pleased to be here speaking on behalf of BVA. And, sorry, it's the, the graveyard slot, but I'll try and make this as entertaining and interactive as possible.
So, the title of this webinar has been inspired somewhat by, the enormous scrutiny that the UK dairy industry has come under, in the last 12 months or so. Particularly by a vociferous and, dare I say it, an extremist vegan lobby, which, you sort of referred to earlier. So I felt a degree of responsibility to sort of clarify where I think the dairy industry in the UK is with regards to, to welfare and sort of.
Float where I think as a profession, we could be contributing and and helping. So. I thought this was the opportunity for me to also present some data that I've gathered over the years and some of the HDB funded research project work that we did at at the Royal Vetley College, which was conducted by a brilliant PhD student, Sophie Collins, with the late Professor Christopher Waus and Charlotte Byrne and Jackie Cardwell.
The, the subject of this talk is really as much about assessing welfare and establishing standards and methods for improvement. So I'm going to touch on some of the issues that actually Jude's referred to, and, and then Gwen as well. So, it should lead nicely on.
My work on welfare assessment was really something that I fell into serendipitously, thanks to the welfare and behaviour group at Bristol. And, so I've worked with Professor Becky Way, John Webster and David May, and they very much inspired a lot of the work I'm going to talk about. But I've, I've always been passionately interested in the subject of animal husbandry and livestock care and, and, and, in particular, lameness control.
But I must confess, while I was studying as an undergraduate, I found the subject could be a little bit tedious at times, and, And I think it was actually the work that they were doing at Bristol when I joined as a, as a PhD student that really inspired me and helped me understand that. You could quantify lots of aspects of welfare, and that was transformational for me. Because it took conceptual ideas and and made them into something we could measure.
And, and that was really important. So I want to share with you that the journey that I've been on and, and share with you some of the data that I've got, and it's very much applied animal welfare, and, and the views are my own, but obviously lots of colleagues have inspired and influenced me. So, in this presentation, I'm going to be fairly ambitious, and I'm, I'm gonna sort of start with some of the challenges and cover some of the challenges from various stakeholder positions, because I think it's important that we understand perhaps where some of our critics are coming from as well.
I'm then gonna crack on and talk about, assessment approaches and what we can use as, as vets to assess welfare. But part of that involves understanding where acceptability lies and, and drawing lines of acceptability. And then I'm going to finish up by talking about where I think we'll head in the future, some of the new exciting things coming along.
So Last year, I found myself in perhaps one of the most disturbing experiences of my career. An animal rights group had sent some photographic material to Sean Poulter at the Daily Mail. Daily Mail gets a mention again.
And I was asked on behalf of the milk buyer and the retailer to go and assess the situation. And I knew this farm very well, and I knew I could find myself in the middle of a a controversy of huge magnitude. So I was fairly nervous going into this one.
But thankfully, the situation couldn't have been easier to deal with from a welfare perspective. So within 2 hours I was out on the farm, so thankfully I was, I was close by and, I can't comment on many of the details, but the activists had produced video footage and pictures, which had a narrative to it, which had a very clear agenda to shock and and damage the reputation of this particular producer. And it was very much focused on the picture you see in front of you, which was about these calf hutches, which If you know sort of the management of calves and calf hatches, there are some major advantages to them in the form of better scour control and better pneumonia control, and as a consequence, lower mortality rate in the pre-wean period, but this wasn't the, the picture that was stated with the the narrative, presented with these pictures.
For this producer, it was a bit of a shock because obviously there's a huge amount of labour and effort that goes into managing cars to the standard that he was achieving and and, yeah, for, for him to understand what the, the problem was, might have initially been a, a, a difficult thing. The, the calves were really well bedded up, which provided. For more hygienic conditions, which you might not necessarily tell from this picture that was supplied by this group.
And as well as, keeping the conditions hygienic, it offers a lot of insulation for the cars and helps keep them warm. So there are lots of pros and cons, quite clearly, and calves legally, after eight weeks must be out of a single hutch system. And that that was one of the things that got discussed.
To the untrained eye, this picture looks really terrible. The, the calves look too large for the pens, perhaps, and, yeah, the, the sea of hutches looks quite shocking. But thankfully, the, the, the dialogue moved quickly on from, the welfare situation.
This farm became one of the most audited farms, I suspect in the world. They had visited visits from Trading Standards, DEFRA, Red Tractor and RSPCA all in quick succession, following on from my visit. And thankfully, all of this enabled us to move on from what was a welfare discussion to what was a perception issue.
And I took away a few important lessons from all of this experience. The first one was that, an activist group that is determined will find damning material and in this case, they've been monitoring the situation for For for 6 months, and they got some pictures that will probably remain the the pictures that are brought out in any headline story on, on dairy cow welfare, not because there's necessarily anything wrong with the welfare of the cars, just because the picture is perhaps shocking to the untrained eye. In this case they used, sort of, .
Yeah, they, they created a sensationalist story and the the the newspaper was very keen to run with this and This was another thing that I discovered was that the newspapers will not verify facts and that there is really no one in a position to legally challenge them on any misreporting. And so the strategy that you end up witnessing is one that just allows the story to die down, and a certain amount of information is provided in order to refute the situation, but actually there's very little to undo the damage that's done with the initial headline. And finally that I guess probably the most important one is actually that.
But the perception of all the stakeholders needs to be understood and that actually visually, visually, this is quite a powerful picture and one that has the potential to shock, and actually it's probably the picture that will determine the future of the larger scale farming systems, perhaps more than anything else. So, of course, we, we could embark on a mission of mass education of the consumer to try and help them understand that. Large is not necessarily poor and that actually large can have some benefits for for animal welfare.
Or maybe we have to accept, we have to look at this slightly differently and manage the visual impact of the systems that we're using. And as I mentioned, for the producer, this can be very surprising and difficult to understand because they're obviously investing a lot of time and in many instances, money in a system that might be labour intensive and and done in order to achieve the highest standards of welfare, and in this case, in order to control scar and pneumonia and mortality in the pre-winning period. So, the answer might lie in some ongoing system innovation or better public relations activity or, or perhaps both, and I want to explore some of these issues in the rest of this talk.
Nick, Nick, sorry, it's good. I just want to check, somebody has, just emailed in to say that their sounds are intermittent and they're losing some information. It's fine on my end.
So I think we'll carry on, but if anybody else is, experiencing, difficulty with the sounds, if you can just write a note in the Q&A, and we'll see how we go. I think it has improved, though. So, sorry, Nick, if we just carry on as we are though.
OK. So perhaps the my biggest concern at the moment is actually that this dialogue is happening and happening as Jude mentioned in social media and and sometimes the intensity of the discussion builds, and perhaps I'm concerned that there might be a degree of complacency and that we're allowing a situation to build and that we're in danger of actually, Destroying what is actually perhaps a very good system in this case, a hutch-based system for rearing cars. So, here's a perhaps a compromise that has better visual appeal.
This is the paired hutch rearing system that's been proposed by the Canadian research team in in the University of British Columbia. So Nina von Kieselli was over last year discussing this. So this is the, the same calves in a situation that, where the bedding hasn't built up to quite the same degree, but, the calves have plenty of space and the degree of infectious control is still very good, but the calves have the social contact.
And the Canadian researchers have demonstrated that there may be some added benefits over the uptake of, feed at weaning, and you get better, continuation of growth at weeding. So there's not the weaning check that you will get at 88 weeks, as you will see in the single hatch system. But there may be some disadvantages, so you might see some increased cross suckling and the monitoring of milk intakes and cake intakes are much more difficult to assess.
And you could see a situation where a stronger calf is taking more of a share of the, the weakest, weaker calf. But these are all things that can be managed. So, the skillful farmer will find a way to overcome some of these disadvantages, but This might be 11 way to soften the appearance of the hatch-based system.
But then there've been other expert, welfare experts within the industry who said, well, actually, maybe this isn't the answer. Perhaps two calves crowding into a single hutch is not an ideal situation, even though, in my opinion, I think that's probably a good thing from calf companionship and sort of sharing of warmth, but, this system has its critics and has yet to become widespread, but I feel this is probably a step forward. But we probably do need to accept that the perception of the consumer is going to be so important going forward, and I've taken some pictures of Twitter, and these have been fantastic for sharing some technically great innovations.
But the perception is that this sterile environment is not appropriate for, for farm livestock, and while it's great from the infectious disease control, it, it's visually very unappealing. And it's going to take a remarkably successful PR campaign to convey the importance of, of infection disease control over and above the visual shock that these pictures can have and. I think the image of the lone calf behind bars is going to be far too emotive, to prevent future damage to the industry reputation if we're not careful.
So I think we need to perhaps, be very aware of this and be much more involved in the discussions about where we go with this, because farmers are and our clients are investing huge amounts of money in, new systems which are achieving great results, but are being misrepresented. To illustrate how we this point that Jude made earlier, that that perhaps we, we have so much information and we can only make limited decisions. I've got a poll question for you.
So, Goodrin's going to start the, the polling for you now. So the question I would like to put to you is, when you buy eggs, what sort of eggs do you purchase? Do you, consciously purchase battery cage eggs, barn eggs, free range eggs?
Woodland eggs, organic eggs, some other system, or you don't make a conscious decision, or you don't buy eggs at all. So, Good, are you able to in the voting? So if, if you can just try, polling, I'm just a little bit concerned because it's saying at the moment the polling is closed.
I don't know if that's Stacey, because we did the poll at the beginning to test it. OK, so I'll give people a few seconds to vote. The numbers are still going up.
About 50% of people have voted, so about another 1015 seconds if you can press your buttons to vote, that would be great. OK, so. This is another the free range concept is something .
OK. Right, sorry, Nick, if I can, I'll give you the we'll end polling now. So.
When you buy eggs, do you purchase battery cage eggs? That was 3%. Barn eggs, 8%.
Free range was the highest at 44%. Woodland eggs, 8%. Organic eggs, 15%.
Or the system was none. I don't make a conscious choice. It was 15%.
I don't buy eggs, 8%. So number one was free range at 44. And then next, it's sort of joint second was organic, and I don't make a conscious choice at 15.
And then a joint fourth with Woodland and barn at 8. OK, so you'd be wondering why have I, ah, there I can see the results. Oh, you can see them.
Yes, that's great. So, you'll be wondering why on earth am I talking about eggs when I'm meant to be talking about dairy cow welfare? Well, I, I've brought this in as an example because, the free range, discussion is obviously well developed in the, the, the egg production industry, and The majority of eggs that that are purchased in store would be, I would think, free range now.
And certainly you, you would struggle to see much else other than free range and barn eggs. Yeah, the work that was done by Christine Nicol, Professor Christine Nicol at Bristol University would suggest actually if you look at welfare outcomes. In particular, keel fractures, injurious feather pecking and mortality amongst other things, then the, the furnished cage, the enriched cage system, which has become the the system used in the UK actually performs very well in compared with other systems, in particular, the, the free range system, which when she was doing her research and publishing on the subject, the free range system in many instances would experience worse welfare outcomes.
Yeah, the, the concept of free range, it probably appeals to us. . In in a number of ways, and, and it's probably the image of free range chickens and the opportunity to express a range of normal natural behaviours that gives us, as the consumer, the impression that it's probably got superior welfare outcomes.
Yet if you look at the evidence, that's not always the case. This, this is not an argument to say that one system is any better than the other. It's just that if you look at the evidence, then we're maybe not making choices based on necessarily the evidence on its own, and the consumer is going to be the same.
For the consumer of dairy products. So, here on the left hand side are some of the chickens that I grew up with on our farm and, they, they had a probably the best of all worlds in terms of welfare outcomes until the mink or the fox got hold of them, on one or two occasions, but, here's the battery cage system on the right-hand side. So, we've got a challenge on our hands because I think to expect us to educate the consumer of dairy products that we're dealing with, systems that might be performing better in terms of some welfare outcomes might not be the way to necessarily always win the arguments with things like free range or calf hutches.
Now I want to move briefly on to sort of the economic performance of and it's relevance to welfare. And you might be surprised to know that we are a net importer of dairy products in the UK as illustrated by some AHDB or HMRC project data here presented by AHDB, which shows our deficits. It is large and increasing in the UK.
So we're not self-sufficient for dairy products, albeit that a lot of these products will be, of a diverse nature. And my, my concern is that, I think we need to have an economically strong industry in order to maintain improving and and high standards of welfare. And if you look at world milk price, then there's huge volatility in milk price, which is growing, and our milk price in the UK will follow this to a large degree, which is rather worrying and disturbing, because if you plot the average cost of production in the UK dairy farm, Then in recent years, you will see the periods of profit in green are getting smaller and smaller, and the periods of, loss are getting longer and deeper.
If you look at the best 25% in terms of cost of production running at about 28 pence per litre, then the future looks a little bit better, but it still doesn't look, lucrative. So we've got some challenges ahead. And so all our decision making going forward probably needs to be made with the, in the context that it needs to be economically viable and economically sustainable.
And I've put this one in because I, I just think this is a fascinating comparison when you look at the price of milk being sold in the supermarket at 48 to 70 pence per litre, and you look at the price of milk at 45 to 90 pence per litre, then you understand the the dairy farmers' frustration. But the opportunity for me, is really with the ethical, consumer. Perhaps the ethically minded consumer might be turning more towards some of the alternatives, which has sold at more than double the price per litre.
And I'd be very interested to know if there is any ethical, and sustainable comparisons between the production of milk and the production of some of the alternatives. Because perhaps the dairy industry will be losing out on the opportunity to invest in better welfare in the future if this comparison isn't properly presented and fairly presented. Does better welfare lead to better economics?
Well, I, I'm a passionate believer in this that you improve the comfort, cow comfort of cows, the the health status of cows, and you will see an economic return on that in many instances when it's well planned and well delivered. And perhaps in some instances, you might expect better economics to improve better welfare, but That might not always be the case, particularly if, if, standards aren't stipulated and, and plans aren't put in place to ensure that the investment gets channelled incorrectly. For a whole variety of reasons that might be for, for, will or not.
When Sophie Collins, the PhD student at RVC, looked at this, there wasn't a clear cut relationship. She looked at a random selection of milk bench recorded farms, from AHDB and the relationship between welfare and economics in a snapshot snapshot survey was not necessarily clear cut. However, I still think that we need to be thinking of the two hand in hand and sustainable welfare needs to be as good as possible within practical and economic constraints.
And the question still lies that do the most profitable farms tend to have the most consistently good welfare? In my experience, that seems to be the case. We still need more evidence to show in a longitudinal way, that improvements in welfare leads to improvements in economics and vice versa.
So, Suffering, is a matter of perspective, and I put this forward, cattle are obviously sentient beings and experience, have the capacity to experience suffering. And I don't think that's a contentious subject, but, so there are a number of issues that have been put forward as a concern for the industry by critics of the industry. So offspring removed from the mother and social group is perhaps one that's going to feature more and more, and Nina Bo Kiesling from British Columbia's commented on this in numerous occasions in the last 12 months that we probably do need to be concerned about how we manage this.
And because it's, it's normal practise and, and there are not many options for avoiding this. We're dealing with a species that's naturally forms social groups that often get disregarded with frequent social group movements, which might be for various reasons, including some degree of separation of, Companions We're dealing with a species that's confined for much of the day and much of the year in many instances, and . The dairy consumer is obviously a little bit concerned about that with what's being presented in the media.
A diet that's got a growing amount of unnatural component. We've seen the routine use of mutilations, so dis budding and castration. We've got issues with disease, which is common and endemic, and in some instances, fear and dominance used as a means of control, herding animals, and there are frequent reports of cruelty and neglect appearing in the in the papers.
But, what I want to do is actually reframe this picture and, and if we apply it to a companion animal. How many of these concerns still apply? And I realise this is a contentious comparison, but here is, our family dog, Suki, on the right hand side, who is very much adored and very much loved, but she was removed from her mother and, and the other pups in her litter at a, at a young age.
And she's a species that forms pack and, and social groups in the form of a pack. From which she's separated. She, she's part of our family pack.
Unfortunately, she is confined in housing for most of the day and most of the year, which might be her choice, but most of the time isn't. She's got a diet that does have some unnatural component. We did have a spade, as a lot of dogs will be, .
Thankfully, she's, because she's a Labradoodle, some of you may recognise that, she's been relatively free of disease, but she might not be, and, and at times we have to tell her off. But, hopefully we don't use a lot of fear and dominance to control her, but a lot of people do use this, and there are reports of cruelty in the press. So, .
But the companion animal perhaps doesn't get the same degree of negative press that the dairy industry's been getting in the last 12 months. Maybe it does, and I'm just not as aware of it. But it's interesting to make this comparison for me, because it raises the question of how we establish what is acceptable at a societal level.
When we're defining welfare, John Webster came up with a, a very good definition, which is fit and feeling good. And that probably encapsulate encapsulates the concept as well as any other. Other researchers and welfare experts would add in the concept of naturalness as being important and perhaps not always caught by the fit and feeling good definition.
So I've got another question for you because this obviously relates to still this idea of free range being perhaps good or bad. How much does naturalness contribute to your own concept of good or poor cattle welfare? And again, I would like to open up the poll and ask you to vote.
So I'll give you a few, few, few seconds to vote on that. OK, we'll end that one there. I think you should be able to see that.
So this is how much does naturalness contribute to your own concept of good or poor cattle welfare? Nothing was 3%, a little, 41%, as much as other 2, 27%, a lot, 22%. Most important, 8%.
So most people saying a little, and that was 41% of respondents. OK, great, thank you very much. Well, I, I think I would agree with you that actually it it does have a part to play.
I just, so people have tried to, . Demonstrate a relationship between animal welfare and productivity. And this paper by Engelbeek and others in 2013, so try to plot a line of animal welfare versus productivity from the most left extreme, which is the the natural situation where cows aren't producing a lot right the way through to an extreme intensive situation.
Going beyond what is productivity most efficient from the productivity point of view. The problem with this is actually, it makes a few assumptions. There's no single welfare index for a start, so it's hard to actually put welfare on a single axis.
And also the fact that, we've got several different systems which are really hard to see where they fit into a, a plot like this. And so we've got a spring block, predominantly grazing type system. We've got autumn block with winter housing and and spring and summer grazing, and then we've got all year round fully housed type systems.
And these are probably the the major systems that are evolving, and, and perhaps we've got some a spectrum of system all in between. And the, the way I would view it is actually that we're seeing with this, with the spring block system, we've got potential to sort of see periods of low grass growth and climatic conditions that will challenge the, the grazing cow, much like you would see in a natural type environment. So it's probably closer to the natural type of, environment than the other type of systems.
And on the other extreme, we've got the fully housed system, which is probably at risk of greatest welfare extremes, but maybe not, maybe without the same extremes of productivity change that you might see with the springbok grazing. So this is probably the best I can make out of this sort of concept. And of course, we may be being a little bit hypocritical to expect naturalness to be the most important thing, yet from the, the consumer perspective, it still resonates very strongly.
But where I do think we may be overlooking some important aspects to naturalness is perhaps with some of the natural herding behaviour. And we see this in other species. It was well defined in polar bears, when there was a lot of work being done on trying to understand why polar bears were exhibiting stereotypies in zoo confined conditions.
And researchers at that time demonstrated it it might have some relationship with roaming distances. With the polar bear roaming many hundreds of kilometres. And I think this is a concept we probably need to explore with cattle, and that house cattle that we may be causing some degree of frustration and stress in some situations when confinement is to a degree that doesn't allow natural herding behaviour and social group formation.
But this is still a new subject for us to look at. How preference may to some degree help us understand what's going on. With the assumption that cows will always choose what is best for them.
And we've seen an experiment in the last year or two where more and more herds are starting to offer cows the choice of indoor and outdoor environments through through the summer period. And seeing that there are populations of cows that will always choose to remain inside, which, as the Harper Adams research has demonstrated, may be a choice to do with being near the feed, but may also be a choice by certain animals that of sort of lower dominance to achieve separation from animals that may be bullying them. So, I think a degree of choice may be a way of mitigating this argument that that we're seeing this polarising argument between the housed versus the more extensively managed dairy cow.
The other thing that could help mitigate some of this polarised argument that's forming between the fully housed system and the free range system might be the encouragement to adopt environmental enrichment, and you only need to see the farms that have added things like these automated cow brushes to see how much the cows enjoy the grooming that they get from these brushes, to realise actually that the environment's probably Fairly barren and that there are ways in which we can add positive welfare features that, that could be very positive for engaging our consumer, the, the dairy consumer and the the dairy customer. So, that's the first part of this talk. I now want to move on to the sort of the practicalities of welfare assessment.
Now that we've sort of discussed about some of the challenges from various stakeholder perspectives. And while I was at the RVC, it became very clear that the one thing that will drive student learning is assessment. And the mantra assessment drives learning was something that, quickly became apparent to me.
And the problem with welfare assessment of dairy herds is it can take days when Sophie Collins was doing her welfare assessment on 50 UK dairy herds. She was spending 22 days to follow the full, welfare quality protocol plus also quality behavioural assessment, which are in this list here. So, we could look at legislation and go through the welfare codes, which are based on the five freedoms.
The five freedoms aren't an assessment protocol, but they are a framework which we could use. But most people have actually said the 5 freedoms only go so far, and they probably don't encapsulate enough some of the other animal needs, particularly some of the more positive welfare, things that we, you know, animals appreciate. We can look at provisions, but such as stocking rates, feed and bed comfort and water space, loafing areas, collecting, you know, that sort of thing, and, and cubicle comfort.
But again, I think recent assessment protocols have really moved on from that, because, a better approach is to assess. Outcomes, such as health status and foot health and some more direct measures of, of animal welfare. And this is a concept that's been embraced by a sure well and to some degree, some of the other welfare assessment protocols.
The one that's probably had the most scientific work done on it is the welfare quality protocol, but that does take a full day in order to go through all the elements. There are 12 criteria that are assessed which can map on to the five freedoms. So some of you will notice the freedom from hunger and thirst.
There's the, freedom from discomfort, pain, injury and disease, freedom from fear and distress. And, freedom to, to, for, for natural behaviour, to express natural behaviour, all appearing in the 12 criteria. And from this, they generate a score which enables us to attribute, an excellent, enhanced, acceptable, or not classified status across a range of areas.
But the fact that this takes too long has proved a major barrier, so. Some researchers, including ourselves, when I was at the RVC, asked them, could we identify iceberg indicators that might predict overall welfare status encapsulating a few different welfare measures. And unfortunately, we couldn't find any evidence to support this, and neither could Bristol University David May and colleagues Siobhan Mullen at Bristol University and Cheryl Heath.
He concluded the same thing. We did look at several putative iceberg indicators from the literature and some of the Scandinavian work suggested cow mortality, calf mortality. Potentially fertility, and some other.
Measures could act as potential iceberg indicators. But ultimately, we're still needing to look at a whole range of measures in order to assess overall welfare. And there actually aren't sufficient number of welfares to assess effective state other than spending a lot of time watching social behaviour and cow behaviour in, in in their group.
Reproductive fitness is an interesting one. This was one that was proposed by the Scandinavians, but clearly is very much influenced by how cows are managed on farm. So, one of the things I wanted to look at was actually how as a vet could I assess welfare.
And David May was proposing a sampling method in which certain animals within the herd are sampled sampled in order to build up a bigger picture of herd status, which is another very good way of shortening a welfare assessment protocol. The other approach that I thought was actually just to spend a milking with a herd and assess all the animals in the herd doing a mini examination. And this was the approach I was asked to adopt with a retailer scheme.
So, I would spend a little bit of time before milking, doing some housing observations. I would look at treatment records to assess things like mastitis, cow mortality, calf mortality, and antibiotic usage, much like Gwen mentioned earlier. I'd also look at how cows were herded, ready for milking.
And, and then I would assess all the cows as they go through the parlour, and it would give me the opportunity to understand how the, the herd were being managed, parlour routines, as well as some other things like mobility scores, cow comfort indicators, and, and some other, welfare outcomes. I could also record time budgets, feeding behaviour, and look at stocking rates. And I've continued using this method for the last 7 years and it's proved very useful with roughly 50 herds going through this, this protocol this year.
And, and here's some of the, sort of time budget figures that you can use to benchmark. These are some numbers from, Nigel Cook's work showing that roughly 5 hours of time spent eating and Roughly 11 to 12 hours should be spent lying down and that doesn't leave a lot of time for penning at milking. How all of this gets communicated to the dairy producer was something I spent a lot of time working with producers on, and we use the gold, silver, bronze rating with a red score for things that were, were at a critical state.
You'll see here some of the welfare outcomes at the top with some indicators of where they should be if they're going to hit the, the silver standard. . Some of the stocking rate parameters at the bottom, these got relegated as we realised actually the welfare outcomes were probably the most important aspect to this assessment protocol.
When it comes to drawing the lines of acceptability and understanding where we should put sort of our own views as to what's acceptable or not, it, it's, it's very much a debate that we need to have as a profession with, with our clients. I'm gonna, in the interest of time, I'm gonna skip this question, but the, the Nottingham Group have really raised the question about is it acceptable that we disperse bud carves with a hot iron without analgesic. And hopefully, most of you now would agree that this is unacceptable, that we probably should be using in addition to local anaesthetic, we should be using some non-steroidal afterwards and there's plenty in the literature now to support the fact that calves will show better behaviour.
During recovery, we'll start drinking more quickly following the disc budding. And there are some growth rate benefits as well. When I was drawing the the standards for the this retail group, I referred to some of the work done by Becky Way, where she consulted experts, and she also did a welfare assessment, breaking down figures into quintiles to show where the best herds were performing and where the worst herds were performing.
And I was using the best 20% of herds as the target for where we needed to be, with our welfare standards in that group. And that's quite a challenging figure because to be in the best group for everything is clearly quite difficult. And when you look at Some more of the recent figures that Sophie Collins has been generating, and we realised that actually the figures still stand to this day, that the welfare parameters haven't changed greatly in the last 15 to 20 years or so.
There are some things that look better and some things that look worse. And unfortunately, lameness, which is an interest of mine, doesn't look like it's improved vastly in the last 20 years, although it does look like it's improved in the last few years. So a question I'd like to put to you is, if you were drawing up what is the acceptable level of score 3, this is severely lame cows in a herd, where would you put your threshold of acceptability?
And Gurin, if I could ask you to open the polling. Yep, polling is open for that one. Thank you.
OK. So we'll end polling there. And so what is the acceptable level of score?
3 lameness in a herd? Where do you put your threshold of acceptability? 0 was 9%, less than 116, less than 3, 44%, less than 5.7, 16, less than 8.3%, none, less than 26.9%, none, not sure, 16%.
And farm specific non. OK. So, and thank you for your contributions there, because, the best 25% of herds in the Healthy feet project achieved a score 3% of less than 1%.
So that was the target that I set a group of 40 producers or so. The average within the Healthy Feet project ended up being at about 3%. The average in the more recent iceberg indicators project by, Sophie Collins came out with, with 5.7%.
So those, those are probably all relevant figures. And when we're drawing up these lines of acceptability, then clearly there's there's probably an argument to use a discussion with the farmer. And, and yourself to try and establish where you think the farms specific target should be.
But the consumer and wider societal groups probably do have a role in shaping some of these discussions, and I think we do need to be mindful of where these groups are, the wider society are expecting us to be as well. So, I'm going to perhaps run over by a few minutes, so I'm just going to race through the last few ideas that that I've got, about where I think we need to be in the future. And Gwen touched on the idea of, of health planning and some of the, the challenges that we've had with traditional health planning, and this was one of the subjects of my PhD which showed that traditional health planning has been perceived by farmers as a bureaucratic process that's perhaps disadvantage to the farm and benefit to someone else in a lot of instances.
And transforming the health planning approach into something that's much more active, engaging has been a subject of great interest to me, because 4 years of my PhD spent applying a health planning approach in a very structured and, and in some ways rigid way, showed that there was no significant improvement in foot health when we measured la's prevalence in cohorts of heifers. Compared with a control group that didn't have the health, the health planning approach applied to lameness in this instance. So, it forced me and my colleagues at then at Bristol to look at what the alternatives was and Gwen mentioned some of the facilitated approach, such as the stable school that some Morgan's using, that was first published by Metavast.
And here's a group of farmers that were using a farmer led approach to sharing ideas to problem solving. And, an improvement in, in farm practises. And for me this was a revelation, because suddenly we had ways of not under of taking this the discussion from what the problem was to how to solve it.
And this was the approach we adopted within the Healthy Feet project, which for the first time demonstrated you could achieve improvement with a facilitated type approach with, in this case, dairy farmers, and a social marketing strategy. And I followed a group of 40 or so farmers since then and showed that you can sustain this improvement year on year, using it, rather than a, sort of, sort of dogmatic, telling type approach using a questioning and problem solving and farmer-led approach. And I'm really proud of these figures, from about, as I say, a group of 40 producers.
So for me, the future really lies in understanding how we can motivate and inspire our, our farmers in the face of the, the growing criticism and the challenges that we face from society. These criticisms are gonna grow because, this is a a survey done by Sarah Pederson that showed up. This was part of a foot trimming survey, but illustrated that 21% of farms that we surveyed were all year round and, mostly housed.
But of course, the house fully housed system can present some very good welfare advantages, and some of the, this very much pasture-based systems can have some disadvantages. So I'm very keen that we move this on from a systems-based discussion to something that's far more evidence-based, based on some quantitative welfare outcomes, to illustrate what are the advantages and disadvantages of all the systems. And to help the consumer understand that there may be some choice.
And there's lots and lots of specific issues which, I didn't intend to talk about, but can be accessed through the Farm Animal Welfare Council reports, of which there have been a few. Probably the thing that the dairy industry will have to sort of rely on more and more is, some of the assurance approaches such as the RSPCA welfare Assurance scheme, that will give the consumer reassurance that welfare standards are at acceptable levels. And so really welcome the RSPCA and In their trying to advance the the standards of welfare through their booklet.
They've got a 48 page booklet that bringing in lots of the latest evidence and concepts on high welfare status management systems. But we also have to be a little bit careful because this also could be repeating some of the mistakes that we made with early health planning approaches that were telling farmers the way that they need to do it. And perhaps some of the, the methods that we've been using, using welfare outcomes to motivate the producer to chase better standards might be the better way to achieve the highest levels of performance in the long run.
I like the idea that we've got some new technology coming on the scene to help us achieve continuous monitoring of cow welfare. And I particularly like the the cow alert system and, and some of the other pedometer systems for measuring on an ongoing basis, cow lying times. So I've I've got here on the right hand side some lying time plots.
But we have to look at how we convert some of these parameters into things that are meaningful to the dairy farmer. And here we see actually a huge variation in lying times in a short space of time, perhaps in this instance brought about by heat stress. And now there is a mobile system that enables us to go from farm to farm, quantifying things like lying times and and other measurables that might relate to welfare on dairy farms.
And we're also seeing the emergence of this technology for detecting things like lameness. So here, again, the cow alert system can now predict certain cows with early signs of lameness and early lesions. So for me, the, the new technology is exciting and, and can be applied to things like negative energy balance.
So here's a herd that experience real problems with negative energy balance in freshly carved cows, as demonstrated by the NMR. energy balance system that they, use, . They use near infrared from milk samples to predict negative energy balance.
So, just to, to finish up, societal expectations will change, and I think we've got to embrace this and support our clients. And the increasing scale of farming, which will be an inevitability, will increasingly shock our consumer, the, the dairy, consumer and the, the customer. So the more we can do to embrace the concepts of positive welfare, the more we can give a positive message, and, and if we can support our clients in making these, these changes the better, and really commend Jess Stokes for championing the fact that we should be working towards, promoting a good life for dairy cows.
And I think in most instances, we do have cows that experience a good life. So just to conclude, societal expectations will continue to change and things like a trusted assurance schemes will help dairy clients, sort of safeguard their future, but we do need to embrace transparency and consumer choice, because that's, that's going to be important for our, our society. Naturalness is an important concept, not least for society.
So we, we need to recognise this and minimise the adverse consequences in terms of welfare. Welfare challenges have changed. I think most cows probably do have a good life.
The challenge is to ensure that they have a better life, and we have ongoing welfare improvement. And as vets, we owe it to the animals that we are advocates for to to participate in this debate. The dairy is scary, and I think it's at the moment, it's scary, mostly from an economic perspective, but it's also scary because of the damage that can be done to the, the industry reputation.
So we need to participate in that debate and guide our clients through a course that's both higher welfare and also an economic success, leading to consumer confidence, hopefully. I do believe in this assessment drives learning and robust quantification is feasible and hopefully you can see that as well. We have no index, we have no iceberg indicator, and there are some measures that still perhaps questionable from the validity point of view, but it's still a useful exercise.
And new technology is something that offers a lot of promise for continuous, robust quality assurance. So, let's embrace it. Let's use it.
And then lastly, I think there's scope to develop, promote and support all positive welfare systems, but to acknowledge there are failings, and we need to address those and consumer trust is easily lost. So we need to help them make informed choices and be transparent whenever we can. So sorry that this, I've used up a lot of my time, but hopefully we've got time for some quick questions over to you, good.
Thank you, Nick. That was brilliant, and such a lot of information in there. And then again, I do believe that these webinars will be available for, for people to go back through, because certainly, there's been a lot of really useful information I think people will want to revisit.
There's some questions coming around, stocking density and people thinking that actually stocking density does really does really matter and her and and and equating that with herd size, and somebody asking, do you support Swedish minimum grazing period? OK, so I'll address the stocking density, stocking rate issue first of all, because we've seen, particularly with the economically challenging conditions in the last 18 months or so, we've seen some herds that, that have increased herd size without increasing their, their, their, their shared provisions, so, and cubicle, provision. And where facilities have been extremely high standard, I think we've seen that done, not at the expense of cow welfare or, or measurable expense to cow welfare, but it's not something I would, I would support.
But I, I can see that, why some farms have done it out of, out of necessity and economic survival, but it's not something that I would support, and I think there are Some minimum stocking rates that we do need to adhere to, but, blanket stocking rates are probably too simplistic because some facilities are of a sort of a 5 star nature, so brilliant quality beds and two row sheds with lots of wide feed alleys and and wide passageways. And those, those sheds probably can handle more cows than some of the traditional housing. So it probably is a case of matching stocking rates.
To the, the age and the, the quality of the facility. Then not only the question of a minimum period of grazing, I think we probably Do have to look at this from sort of the engaging our, our cus the consumer point of view. And it's a, it's perhaps a PR exercise, but I I'm also a believer that we actually should put as much attention on to improving the facilities of the indoor house cow, and that there are some parts of this country where I don't think it's in the best interests of the cow to be turning her out for a few weeks and then bringing her in for a few weeks.
So, I've got clients that I work with in Scotland, and really to get a good grazing period in this, this summer. Meant too much of turning cows in and out, which wasn't good for them. And, and actually perhaps the emphasis should be on improving the management of the cow during the house period.
And equally, there are farms that I work with in some of the overseas climates where actually, you know, there's just no option for turning cows out. And do I think the welfare of those cows is good. It's in many instances, exceptionally good, but there are compromises that we don't understand, which might be on.
Formation of herd groups and and roaming behaviour and synchronised herd behaviour, which doesn't seem to have a negative impact on cow stress, as reflected by some of the diseases that we see, but may have some unseen effects that we can't manage. No, I don't think that's fully answered it. So I think I'm not keen on blanket numbers of days out, but I appreciate we probably have to do that in order to maintain the trust of wider society.
Thank you. And, and just to, we've just got time for one last question to try and bring a few questions that have come in together. With, potentially a change in or getting rid of the common agricultural Policy, as the UK leaves the EU, there's discussions on, on what's going to replace it and assurance schemes have been discussed as as one benchmark, but people, in the questions have given.
Examples where actually the assurance schemes have failed in their eyes or the enforcement hasn't been robust enough. So I suppose the questions that are coming through is what do you feel about insurance schemes going through with it being a benchmark post cap, and how do we better or make sure they are enforced? Yeah, so, assurance schemes, is something I support, but it can only go so far.
And that's why, you know, one of the key messages is that I, I, I think the veterinary profession, really has an opportunity to, to be part of all of this and, and, and are part of all of this. It's, you know, the. The vets I, my colleagues I work with are very much engaged in all of this, but yeah, a single audit, once a year, once every 18 months is such a blunt tool.
It's really picking up the bottom end of the scale. And so I . Yeah, I think we need to look at some of the technology innovations coming through to to try and introduce a bit more continuous assurance.
The dairy producer is very nervous about using this data because they feel it's something else to criticise them with. And so it's probably a case of using this continuous monitoring. As a tool, as an advisory tool at this stage.
But at some points, I think the the most progressive producers will be very keen to show their data in a transparent way as part of their own quality assurance. So it's probably going to happen at a and that some of the larger producers are probably going to do this as a matter of their own quality assurance. Thank you very much, Nick, and lots of, statements coming through of really interesting, no matter what species people are working in.
So I think people have really gained from, what you've said this afternoon. That's brought us to a close on the Farm to Fork session. Three excellent speakers, and a real thank you to Nick for bringing that all together at the end, looking at the welfare side of it.
So, it's just a thank you to everybody for listening. Please do stay engaged with this topic. It is something that It is really important at the moment, particularly as we go through EU exit, and the British Veterinary Association is really keen to hear what you, you, your, your thoughts are on these topics and the role that the veterinary professionals can play, in all this farm to fork area and new legislation that may be coming through.
I hope you all have a good weekend. The virtual congress from the webinar vet is, is certainly carrying on with Gusto, and there's some excellent topics coming up. You can see all the topics, that are coming through for tonight and all day tomorrow.
They're on the, webinar vet website. So please do have a look, and enjoy the rest of your weekend. So, thank you very much, everybody, for, listening in, and we'll make sure that these are available.
