Good evening everyone, and thank you for joining us for tonight's BCVA webinar. My name is Sarah Peterson from the BCVA board, and I'll be chairing the webinar tonight. Our speakers Nick and Owen are happy to remain online for questions, so please type any that you may have in the Q&A box during the webinar, and I'll save your questions for the end of the presentations.

If you have any difficulties, then please let us know in the Q&A box and we'll do our best to assist you as well. If you can't see the Q&A box, then if you move your mouse, the taskbar should appear at the bottom of your screen. So it's my great pleasure tonight to introduce two fellow foot enthusiasts as our speakers.

Doctor Nick Bell and Owen Atkinson. Nick will be our first speaker tonight and will be taking us through the Healthy Feet Project, which he was heavily involved with during his time at Bristol University, where he spent time both as a PhD student and later a research fellow. Nick has maintained his interest in feet and now runs a consultancy business that sees him travelling all over the world to advise on foot health.

Alongside this, he is an honorary associate professor at the University of Nottingham, Chief Auditor for the Cattle Hoof Care Standards Board, a ROMs approved instructor, and an instructor on the newly launched Level 4 ft trimming course. Following swiftly in Nick's footsteps tonight, we have Owen Atkinson, who established dairy veterinary consultancy after over 20 years in practise. Like Nick, he also travels far and wide, providing advisory and training services for all types of dairy businesses across the dairy supply chain.

Owen is a cow cow signal's master trainer, Nuffield scholar, and although being involved in lots of areas of cow health, has a particular interest in foot health and is the co-author of the textbook Bovine Surgery and Lameness. He worked alongside Nick in the formation of the AHDB Healthy Feet programme, and he will be taking us through the programme this evening along with some exciting developments with the launch of the Healthy Feet programme Light. So before we start, I've been asked by Nick to capture who's in our audience tonight.

So I'm just going to launch a poll here, which you should see pop up on your screen. What I'd like you to do is to answer, what is your primary profession? So, are you a veterinary surgeon?

Are you a foot trimmer? Are you a consultant, a mobility scorer, a dairy, do you provide dairy extension services? Are you in academia or research or something else?

OK, I'm gonna end the polling now. OK. So 68% of our audience tonight are veterinary surgeons.

We've got 2% mobility scores, 2% providing dairy extension services, 5% in academia and research, and 23% providing other services to the industry. OK. So thanks very much for for joining in that poll, but I'm now going to hand over to Nick to kick us off.

Thank you, Sara. Good evening everyone. It's really pleasure to be here tonight, talking on this subject.

So, so thank you to BCVA for organising this and also to AHDB because I think Owen and I, and Sara as well are really thrilled that . I actually been keen supporters of the, the Healthy Feet programme for the last 9 years, and we've had the opportunity to, to relook at this, in association with colleagues at the Royal Agricultural University. So tonight I'm going to kick off by talking about, some of the origins of the Healthy Feet programme.

I'm going to talk about the Healthy Feet project, which was the original research project run at the University of Bristol. Which really looked at lameness and and hoof health from the producer's pers perspective. But before I do that, I'm going to give you a little bit of an overview.

So I'm, I'm gonna actually start by looking at a project which was my PhD and I always tell PhD students that, the research can be a little bit of a roller coaster ride. So I, I'm gonna start off showing you my roller coaster ride, and, and then I'm going to move on and, and talk about how we turned that into what I think was a highly Successful venture, which was the Healthy Feet project, which ran between 2006 and 2010, which was a primarily a social marketing strategy applied to a, a a research trial. And, and I say it's delivered without brilliant technical advice and sophisticated data analysis, because we'd sort of tried the, high level advice and.

Data reporting in the, in the first trial and that had backfired and I'm going to explain a little bit why I think that might have happened. It's not to say if you've got brilliant technical expertise and brilliant data analysis that it's not going to help, but, we're able to deliver a benefit without some useful technical insights and data analysis, but we use some very simple facilitation tools. I'm going to explain a bit more about what I mean, in a moment.

And then, so that's the Healthy Feet project. And then Owen's going to move on and talk about the Healthy Feet programme, which was the dairy Code, which then became AHDB organised. Programme from 2011 until now.

And I'm going to take the unusual step by acknowledging a really significant group of people that really inspired me enormously and, and helped shape. Certainly my views on how we deliver healthy feet, advice and and support. And particularly this chap on the right hand side, Michael, who, he's a great friend of mine and was a guinea pig and suffered enormously in the early years of my work.

So I'm greatly indebted to Michael, but also the, the, the team at Bristol and the Tub Charitable Trust who funded the Healthy Feet project. OK, so. As I say, I'm gonna take you back to the start of my journey on, on lameness and dairy cows, which was with my PhD project.

I trimmed a few cows before this, but this was really my baptism, and it was a project that ran from 2002 to 2006, funded by DEFRA. And here's a page at my thesis, which, those of you that are keen. Enthusiasts on digital dermatitis control, you, you'll hopefully be able to quickly recognise the important points here.

So my PhD project was all about applying Hassip, and sometimes you might groan at the thought of Hassip that. so it's hazard analysis and critical control point, which is all about identifying the control points in a process, in this case applied to the disease we know as digital dermatitis, and trying to establish which are the ones that are critical to the overall control of the disease. And it was a hugely intellectually rewarding experience going through this process.

I just, I loved going into the detail of it, so we have to break down digital dermatitis into the fact that we've got a reservoir of infection, which is largely lesions. So this is, this is to represent the infected, infectious reservoir in the cows and the lesions. And then the, the hypothesis at that stage, we didn't really know for sure, but there was, we were thinking there was some sort of cross infection in the slurry, which thankfully down to Liverpool University's work and, and others around the world, we've got a bit of a clearer idea on that.

And infections came in, generally with a biosecurity breach, which was probably infected animals brought in and but possibly also on infected kit, and, you know, this could be knives or or other machinery. Which could then be bringing infection in, but actually the, the infected kit could also be a source of problems. And number 6 was the treatment hygiene, which has been highly controversial bit of work done at Liverpool University, but I think I'm really excited to see that works come to fruition.

So this summarises the approach that we applied to developing a lameness control programme, which we applied to 60, well, it's applied to 30 farms in the Southwest. And we had 30 control farms. Early on in the process of delivering this project, I conducted a survey, 58 of the 60 farms participated in it, and it was to get an idea of farmer perceptions of lameness control.

Of, of herd health plans, and it, it was in relation to mastitis and lameness, but it was to gather their farmer perceptions. And maybe the alarm bells should have rung at this stage, because half of the 236 comments I got back from the farmers while doing this face to face survey, half of them. Expressed some sort of disadvantage to the farm of going through the the health planning approach with their vets.

Of course, half of the comments suggest that there was a benefit, but of which, a substantial proportion of those benefits were perceived to be to another party, which was either the, farm assurance body or the processor or the retailer, or, or some other external person. It could be the, the local vet. So.

I perhaps should have sort of taken heed of this, perhaps, but, we, we ploughed merrily on with the project. And after 3.5 years of hard graft, you press the button on the statistical package and discover there's no statistical difference in the intervention and the control group.

It brings about a a a sobering moment, a huge amount of time, effort and resource applied to something that on the surface looked a spectacular failure. And so this is I. Tell all the PhD students I meet, and Sara's one of them that you know that it can be a roller coaster ride, this, this, this research business.

And of course, in my fiver, while I was trying to defend. This, all this time, effort and money that had gone into this project. My, my, PhD external examiner was tearing me to shreds.

But he helped me realise that actually, this was a really important finding, that we'd, in developing this wonderful lameness control programme that was highly systematic and detailed and providing all this data to farms and all these insights. It was a project that was designed from the vet perspective, my, my own perspective and the vet advisor perspective. of course, I was a researcher at that point.

And I was loving the detail and loving the analysis, but clearly, you know, that was not high on the priorities for the dairy farmer. And so I've, I've drawn a bit of irony here, showing two pictures of farmers doing what I feel are quite unusual activity for farmers. Now, of course, there's something useful in every experience, including a bad experience, and I like to think there's a silver lining in all of this, and of course there was.

We, we gathered some incredibly useful data, and I ended up doing a lot of foot trimming, so we gathered some lesion data. We had a lot of Layer score data, we had a lot of risk data. We were able to relate that back to some quite important families of risk factors.

So we were able to identify 5 critical control points for lameness, and they were, namely foot disinfection or foot bathing. Foot hygiene, which obviously could be achieved through foot bathing, but, you know, primarily aimed at slurry management. Comfort, in relation to to lying times and standing times.

And then car flow and walkways. And then last but not least, but it's the early detection prompt effective treatment. And these, these were hugely useful, and quite important for informing the next phase of work, because we got a second bite at the cherry thanks to the Tubni Charitable Trust.

And this was ended up being a really well funded project, which lasted 4 years. We recruited 227 farms. And right at the outset, we, we made the decision that we were going to design a project that was really aimed at motivating farmers, looking at how we could maximise engagement.

And there was a real team effort, a brilliant team of people there at Bristol. It was a really exciting. Period of my career.

I worked with some wonderful people, and, David May, Becky Way were real pioneers within within this project. John Huxley was involved. I've never probably said thank you to Spike for his involvement, with this project, and then there was a team of us on the ground dealing with the farmers day to day, and, we've got Claire, Catherine and Zoe here, alongside me with a bit more hair back then, but one of the most important steps was that David May suggested we should have some marketing training.

And so, we all had a little bit of training on marketing, and we also did some very detailed facilitation training, which was absolutely crucial to the success, I think, looking back at retrospect to the success of this, this project. We did take some things from the, the previous Heffer lameus project that was my PhD. And one of the things was we, we felt we needed a, a robust, measurable outcome.

And, and in this case, I, I would have loved to have gone back around 227 farms doing foot trimming, but we had to be realistic. What was the most efficient way of gathering a, data across that many farms with a lot of cows. And we felt that actually the mobility score would be a really useful and motivating measure.

And, the, the lamest score that we developed, was highly successfully translated into the AHDB mobility score, which has been a really fundamentally important part of driving improvement on a lot of farms that I've worked with and, and come across. So that was a really exciting step that happened within this project. We also took the process of doing a risk assessment and looking at lesion trends, but we did a very much simplified look at lesion trends.

So, on the right hand side is one of Catherine's summaries of the the lesion treatment data for a farm. On the left hand side, we've got the risk assessment that was all run through the website, the Catalanus website. Of course, this was important data, perhaps more for the facilitators, and that's what we called ourselves, because we were quite keen that we were going to have a totally change of philosophy in this project.

And it was to give the facilitators better insight as to what the challenges were on each of the farms that we were visiting. Probably one of the main breakthroughs was this discovery that Becky Way made of a social marketing strategy. Now, I want to emphasise this is very different to social media and social media strategy that came around soon after this project.

Now, what we noticed was pride was a really important motivator for dairy farmers. I'm gonna show you some data to support that in a moment. And so we, we wanted to create a brand, a club that was going to rally farmers around the, the sense of pride of doing something that was going to help the dairy industry, help their their cause and help their herds.

And I also mentioned we we wanted to really utilise facilitation to its very best to try and make sure that we were doing things from very much a farmer perspective. We didn't want to go in top down with our advisory approach, although we did offer guidance and advice along the way, in the form of, me, John Huxley or, or Spike, offering some nameless control plan support. And the facilitators, and that's Claire, Noosh, Zoe, Catherine, and to some degree, myself, we focus on a few key things in our discussions with farmers, one of which was the benefits and barriers to improving foot health on each of the farms that we were engaging.

Social marketing also describes the use of regular prompts, in other words, reminders. And so we brought, I'll give some, show you some examples of these in a moment. Utilising social norms.

I'm gonna explain what that means in a moment, providing some incentives and gaining some commitment from the farmers that they're going to make some changes. So if we start with the motivator, we, so what we did was we, we created the brand, and that was the Healthy Feet project with the strapline working together to reduce cattle lameness. And, a chap at Bristol created this logo for us.

And that was based largely on some, on some survey work, led by Katherine Lee, which, you can see in this graph, ride in the healthy herd was came out most strongly as a motivator. Of course, there were some other things. The farmers felt sorry for lame cows and the lame cows were a public image risk, but it was the pride that we thought we would major on giving the given the results of this survey.

So the facilitation training, was a bit of a revelation for us, and it really helped us move from this, quite, perhaps this tell approach, which we can quickly fall into if we're not careful, into a show. Show me what the problem is and, and, and help the farmer see what the problem. How it could be addressed.

So if we're ever going to use the word tell, it would be tell me more about it. And so we we'd use open questioning techniques to really try and understand the producer perspective. And, saying that I sometimes use is, give a farmer solution, and they will find a problem.

Give a farmer a problem, and they will always find a solution, because farmers are brilliant problem solvers on the whole. So if you can help define what the problem is, then by and large, if they see the importance of it, then they will find a way around it. And so by using the clever use of open questioning, we were able to hone down on what the problems were and, and identify some of the benefits and some of the barriers to achieving those benefits.

And that was hugely exciting. Of course, one of the main barriers was expressed by all the farmers, which again was highlighted by the survey conducted by Catherine, led by Catherine, but it was the, the lack of time and the lack of labour resource on the farms. But actually, it was one of the farms on the project that said to me, Well, it's not lack of time that's our problem, it's lack of prioritisation.

And I think he hit the nail on the head. He was actually applying it when I said I was just feeling a bit too busy, and he said, well, you know, it, you just got to work out what you need to prioritise. And of course, that's what facilitation is really good at doing is helping identify what is actually important and how, how can we get there.

Now, I mentioned right at the start, we used some prompts, and of course, having the logo plastered everywhere was a really good way of doing it. So, I still got my woolly hat and I've still got my Gilele that I use. But we also had some window stickers, which I had in my, I stuck in my car, and, and I had that until relatively recently.

I changed my car after many years. And we also use things like, some email reminders, telephone calls. We, we put things in the, in the, press, in the media.

Nowadays, we'd probably use social media a lot more. We we even sent out Christmas cards, just to remind people that they were on this, this club, they were part of this club, part of this mission to improve foot health. And my word, what a different feel some of these things made to the overall project.

The farmers realised that we were really trying to help them and, and, and support them with just such simple things as these little reminders. This resetting of norms is quite an exciting concept, which, I think has been described in a number of publications, but was really well described in this social marketing strategy. And the idea is that, farms can work in their bubbles, and I was using that term before we, entered this COVID pandemic, but farmers can work in these bubbles, and lose sight of what is actually normal and, and their day to day working becomes normal.

And we wanted a way to maybe see, show farmers, show farmers, that there might be a different way and that things might look differently. And of course, that's not easy, and you can do that through the use of meetings. That's farmers going to see things on other farms as a great way of helping farmers reset their norms.

But we also use things like we had a whole range of facilitator tools. So we had a little picture library that we could use. So we have a picture such as this one.

This is from a farmer I visited recently, and I thought, wow, this is a great way of showing farmers things can be a little bit different. And we, we had plenty of facilitator resources and, links to farmers that were prepared to give support to other farmers, some testimonials, some supplier lists so, so people could actually just overcome what they, what were their established norms. So I mentioned farmer meetings, and farmer meetings really were an important part of this whole process.

Now. This isn't an ideal facilitated meeting. This actually proved to be one, an overly popular meeting.

I didn't, the ideal facilitated meeting would have 6 to 8 producers, and, this just showed the level of enthusiasm and excitement that we were getting for, for this, this mission that we're on. I'm gonna maybe leave it to Owen to mention a little bit about stable schools, if he's got time at the end, but I think this concept of facilitated producer meetings has really taken on a new meaning with the, the farmer action groups, which, is going to be part of some of the future work that we're doing within the Healthy Feet programme. And everyone likes some rewards.

And so we decided we'd have a few little prizes, and we awarded certificates. So we were quite generous at throwing these out, and we had a few little freebies for, for people that we felt were, really going above and, and beyond. And, and some of these things just acknowledged the, the work and effort that was being put into the project.

And my word, that, that recognition went a long way. And we all like little. Incentives like that, that few freebies.

Now, the, the last one, which is the one that made me most nervous, and I know, I know Sara and Owen probably shared a degree of this nervousness right at the start was this idea of gaining commitment. Now, we, we wanted to make sure we had some agreed actions at the end of the facilitated discussion about what the problems might be and, and how could they be tackled. And here on the right hand side, we've got the, the action plan list that, We used within the Healthy Feet project.

This was in triplicate, so we left a copy with the farmer, we sent a copy to the, the local vets, and we kept a copy for ourselves. And at the bottom, you'll see there's a space there for the farmer's signature. And this made me rather concerned.

And of course I went and and tried this out on a few farms, and I was blown away because it. Mostly, if the farmers had talked through it properly and that we'd facilitated the discussion properly, so it was totally from their perspective, the, the actions, and that they, we tended to end up with a list that they were absolutely agreed to, and they were quite happy to commit to it. And then occasionally, it would just make the producer go, actually, let me think about this again.

Well, I maybe won't say I'll do that within 3 months, but I'll certainly do that within 9, or they'll, they would tweak it a little bit. And so it was a really good way just to make sure that what was there on the list was actually something they were committed to do. So it just achieved that added degree of focus.

And so I feel it was a really valuable part of the overall, overall process. So What were the results? Well, .

As I said, we had 227 farms. They were scattered far and wide, mostly, you know, in the southwest, but we did have farms in Wales and and in the Midlands and just about reaching up into the the north and northwest. And it was a 4 year project and we evaluated mobility score annually on each of those farms and we saw.

Thankfully, a year on year improvement. In fact, the mobility score prevalence was very high right at the start, and, and by the end, we, we were seeing quite a reasonable improvement. But what alarmed me and, and colleagues at Bristol, was the fact we appeared to see an improvement in the control group, as well as the intervention group, which we really hadn't anticipated and we're a little bit concerned about.

Until we looked at what . Until we looked at what the farms were doing, and we saw that actually the control farms were doing an awful lot of changes, and we thought perhaps we'd inadvertently intervened on those control farms by doing a mobility score, but we also asked the farms what they've changed in the last 12 months. And of course that had probably inadvertently erased their awareness that they could be doing more, and that the mobility score was a little bit high.

And actually, farms knowing that they were control groups, there's probably nothing more motivating than being told you're the control group. And, and we were just going to see what, what they were going to achieve over the four years without our input, and that, that in itself was probably quite motivating. So we and this was Becky Way who sort of came up with this idea that actually we should probably look at a group that would turn the Hawthorne Group, and they were the group that hadn't actually been involved with any of the mobility scoring or the questioning, but we retrospectively asked them what things they'd changed.

And it was quite startling. They, they had done far less in relation to lameness control than either the control group or the intervention group. So, to conclude, it's very easy to work from our own perspective.

It's absolutely natural to do that, and I, and I think we can all be guilty of that at times. And what facilitation did for us was it helped us go back and understand what the farmer issues were. And so I conclude that facilitation was transformative.

It was a really tough thing for me to do because As a vet, I was just naturally wanting to chip in with thoughts, advice, guidance, ideas, but that completely disrupted the facilitation process. By facilitation, it was purely focused on understanding what the farmer was able to do. And we remain very pure at that, and I think that was actually to the project's strength.

Time poverty is obviously a really key issue for all dairy farms, but actually if prioritisation is the key, then again, facilitation is probably the approach to help with the prioritisation. There's a lot of cultural baggage, and we, we discovered that, and we had to be very careful with the language and the terminology we use. So that was why we moved from talking about lameness scoring and locomotion scoring to the, the terms mobility scoring and foot health.

And we tried to make things a lot more positive for farmers. We used cartoons like we had on the right hand side here to try and lighten it and and try and make the whole subject more positive. And mobility was a very simple and useful outcome measure that we were able to measure the success over a period of time.

And by going at this for 4 years, we were able to really give plenty of opportunity to see the full benefits of the, the measures that we were applying or the farmers were were making on farm. And then lastly, I think the really important bit was the creation of the club using the social marketing strategy. And, and I would say all the ingredients of that social marketing can be things that we can all apply and do, and, and hopefully that's something you can go away with and, and think about tonight.

And of course, Owen's going to talk a little bit more about that in the Healthy Feet programme. So, thank you very much for listening. Hopefully that, that, that was of interest.

I just quickly acknowledge some of the funders for that. So, now I'd like to hand over to Owen, who can talk a little bit more about the Healthy Feet programme. And, so I'll hand over to her now, so, I'll stop sharing.

Oh, well done. Thanks, Nick. I said I was gonna cut you off at 8:30, exactly.

Am I on time? Just about. What on.

Brilliant. Lovely. Thank you very much and welcome, everyone.

So, yeah, my job tonight is really to introduce what the Healthy Feet programme looks like, having had that background from Nick of, of where it perhaps came from as the Healthy Feet project. And also introducing Healthy Feet programme, Light, which is just, what it says, really. It's a lighter version of the Healthy Feet programme.

But before we do that, Let's just look at what the full health, the full fat Health feat programme is, and also I'd like to find out a little bit more about who I'm speaking to. So I know we have the poll at the beginning and I know that 2/3 of you are vets, but here's my question. So which of the following best describes you?

Either A, I'm a mobility mentor, in other words, someone who's been trained already to deliver the Health feet programme, or B, I'm not a mobility mentor, but I might want to become one, or C, I'm not a mobility mentor, and I almost certainly would like to become one, or D, I'm not a mobility mentor, and I've got no intention of becoming one, or none of the above, and I'm pretty fluid on this issue. You can be pretty fluid on other issues too, but, E is for if you're kind of a fluid kind of person. Don't like to be pigeonholed perhaps for the E person.

I'm, I can't see, sorry, you might be able to see who has voted. So we've got about 75% of voters so far, we had 80% of you voting last time, can we get more than that? Taskmaster Sara.

Yep, definitely, so we're just 2% off it. I'm just gonna give you a couple more seconds. Again, no trick questions, it just helps us, direct things in the future.

OK, I'll close it there, just 3% below where we were last time. OK. So I'll go down from the top to the bottom.

In terms of, A, I'm a mobility mentor. I've got 13% mobility mentors. B, I'm not a mobility mentor, but might, might want to become one.

That's 34%. That's our most, answer, hooray. See, I'm not a mobility mentor and almost certainly would like to become 1 23%.

So, yeah, over half of you wanna be one. Wow. Fantastic.

Well, so, and 13% are one, so that's, that's fantastic, 70%. D, I'm not a mobility mentor and have no intention of becoming 1, 8%. And E, none of the above.

I'm pretty fluid on this issue, 23%. Cool. Right, thank you.

That's really useful. And, and sorry, thanks, Sara, it gives you just a bit of a heads up. So yeah, it looks like I'm talking to the converted to a large extent, and hopefully this will help you understand what the Health Feet programme is for those 50% who are interested in becoming one.

So the Health Feet programme, it's kind of, this is what the logo looks like now, it's owned if you like, or looked after by AHDB. Previously, Derick Cohen, that was the logo, and that kind of evolved out of the Tubney Healthy Feet project, which Nick has described very much. Now I guess I did have an involvement in, in how the Health Feet programme came about, and it, and I'll just explain that.

Cos listening to how Nick's journey, began and took him to where he got to with LB Project is totally different to where I came in. So I went on a Nuffield, travel scholarship and I came back very enthusiastic in 2010. Having already become a, into cow signals, having learned that actually, you know, as vets telling people what to do isn't the way forward.

My, my project, my Nuffield project was to, was to look at how vets could work with dairy farmers better for knowledge transfer. That was the kind of title of the project. So I was full of this new way of working with farmers, perhaps with a slightly different attitude, rather than being the expert who goes and diagnoses and solves and then gives instructions.

Perhaps someone who has facilitation, coaching, mentoring skills. And one way to look at that is to think of yourself as the vet, as the farmer's thinking partner. Rather than expert.

And I was. Bursting with ideas on how to develop a lameness control programme. Already Derico had the mastitis control plan, which was successful.

It had been launched a few years previously. I got in touch with Dericho and I spoke to someone called George Fisher, who was head of Knowledge Transfer at the time. We got on very well, George and I, I explained what I was doing already with some clients in practise and how I'd using some of the, some of the cow signals tools, to reduce lameness, how I'd been working with teams of, of people working on farms, rather than just individual farmers, and how my approach was, was, was using this facilitation process rather than, an advisory process.

And I had some ideas. Having been around to New Zealand and, and, and, the USA of how to put a programme together. And luckily, thank goodness, I phoned up Nick Bella about the same time because I was aware of the Tobni project, but I didn't know much detail, and the timing was perfect because the Tobni Healthy feet project was just coming to an end, and it kind of needed somewhere else to go.

So I'd come at it from a very, very different angle from Nick, who came. On the back of doing a PhD and an academic approach to how to reduce lameness and develop a, a lameness management programme. And I came at it having come back with my enthusiastic take on facilitation, mentoring, coaching from my Nuffield scholarship, but we were straight away talking the same language.

And very, very quickly, we worked well together, having not known each other before, and quickly developed a programme, which is called the Healthy Feet programme. It's delivered by deliverers who are called mobility mentors, and we chose the name Mobility Mentor, perhaps a little bit, at the time, it was a bit controversial. This sounds a bit really wishy-washy, this idea of being a mobility mentor, but it was very much to get over that actually we were trying to .

We were trying to make it very clear that the management, the lameness management programme that we were proposing was as much to do, or more to do with the attitude of the person who was delivering it and the attitude in which the programme was delivered. It's much to do with that as actually the nuts and bolts of the kind of science behind lameness management. Which is also important, we acknowledge that, but the attitude is very important.

But we still need to have a framework which mobility mentors, deliverers of the programme could work towards. And so what I've shown you there is a screenshot of different aspects of, of, of the materials to help guide mobility mentors in delivering this programme. We have got a structure to it.

It does have a structure. It's got a kind of a beginning, a middle and an end or a, a, a, a, it never ends, it, it, it follows on. The beginning starts with really collecting information.

So, mobility scoring is a very useful starting point, doing a whole herd independent build score, developing something called the lens map, which I'll show you later on. But basically, that's just using whatever information we've got available to work out what the main lesion types are. Now, that could be foot trimming records, which might be excellent, or it could be just using the farmers' perception of what their main lameless types are.

But in the full fat, version of the health feet programme. It also involves a farm visit to actually lift and look at some cow's feet and look at what the, what the typical lesions are that the farmer is dealing with. That moves on to the second section which, which is developing a management plan, and that's done with the aid of a risk assessment tool or a series of checklists, which I will show you what the structure of that is.

Looking at environmental management impacts or effects that might impact on lambs in the herd, and then developing this, this facilitated action plan with the whole farm team along very much the same lines that actually Nick had developed through the Toubney Healthy Feet project. Importantly though, it doesn't end at that point. So having developed the plan and agreed it, it really is important to keep going back to it and checking in to see how people are getting on.

So that ongoing monitoring and support is part of the structure that's built in in the Healthy feet programme with regular checkpoints and also a quarterly independent whole herd mobility score. That's a, another graphic, which is sometimes used to describe the time frame. The time frame is fairly flexible, but, you know, you do your first couple of visits in the first few weeks or so, the independent business schools keep going on a quarterly basis, and, every 6 months or so, depending on the farm, you would have a structured review point.

Now another important part of the structure of the Healthy Feet programme is something called the 4 success factors for Healthy Feet, and this is derived from cal signals. This is something which wasn't part of the Healthy feet project that Nick described, it was a cow signals thing. The four success factors of these.

1, low infection pressure. 2, good hoof shape or horn quality. I think now we're sort of developing that into a new term.

We're talking about foot robustness, having robust feet. 3 is to have low forces on the feet and the two different types of forces on the feet. One is kind of a compressive standing up force, and the other is a shearing sideways kind of movement force.

To to reduce the standing up forces, you need to have good cow comfort and good line times. To reduce the shearing forces, well, good cow flow is important there. And we'll look at the aspects of what's included just in a sec.

And then the fourth one is early detection prompt effective treatment. The new version of the Health Feet programme has got some nice graphics to describe those, 4 success factors, and they kind of run throughout the whole programme and all the supporting materials to embed the ideas in farmers' minds. The idea of these four success factors, though, is really to simplify what is a complicated, aetiology of lameness and just make it as accessible as possible for farmers to know, ah, that's what I need to do to achieve X.

So look at each in turn, starting with low infection pressure. Well, these are the kind of things that are involved here, foot bathing, slow management, biosecurity. If you've got digital dermatitis, you don't be buying in new strains in particular.

And if you haven't got digital dermatitis, very important to keep it out. And reducing the reservoir of infection, the reservoir of infection are those cows with lesions. And that's particularly important for digital dermatitis, but other infectious types of lameness, such as owl and heel erosion, or heel, are, are included here too.

So examples would be looking at making sure feet are dry and clean, good housing, and foot bathing, good foot bath design. Looking at the robust feet of the good hoof shape and horn quality, it's a bit of a catch-all on this one. So it includes some nutritional aspects, for example, biotin supplementation.

It includes, genetics, it includes regular hoof checking to make sure they're not over overgrown toes, which can be a risk for sole bruising soul also. Also drainage, so wet feet are, are, are, are soft feet and they get worn. And this is the one that has kind of been exciting, if you like, because it's been added in as, as our understanding of lay aetiology has been built up over the past few years, is looking after the body condition score of the cow in order to main maintain an effective fat pad or digital cushion, which is, as we all know now, I think everyone listening to this will probably know, is so important to reduce the risk of claw horn lesions.

So it's particularly important for Claw haul in this one, there's a little bit of a crossover because if you look after drainage in order to get dry feet, then that will have a, a beneficial effect for the infectious diseases too. So, just a diagram to sorry, a photograph just to illustrate some of the points. Avoiding thin carving heifers or cows would be an important aspect of having robust feet because we don't want thin and non-protective, digital cushions.

Coming to forces on the feet, well, Looking at the cow comfort side of things first, cubicle design is obviously important, but also wider aspects such as time budgets, time away from the beds, that would include how long the cow's been milked for, what's the lockup time like, . If it's a very big herd, maybe the, the milking time is a long time, for example. They're also looking for space and space allowance in the shed and the overall design of the shed.

So have we got a lot of waiting cows or do cows tend to go and lie down very quickly when they're able to? So what we're looking for really in an ideal shed is to have no more than about 15% of cows at any one time, either not lying and chewing their could, or standing and eating. Anything else is kind of abnormal.

OK, you know, some cows will be drinking a bit of water, some cows will be bowling, some cows will be socialising, but there should never be more than 15% of the cows doing that, that kind of thing. So that's cubicle design and cow comfort, looking at the cow flow aspect, so . Often people think about the titans coming out of the parlour.

That's one that often is the first example that comes to mind. But that's less important actually. That kind of thing is less important than the big one for cow flow, which is stockmanship.

So the behaviour of human beings around the cows can be a huge influence on cow flow. One way to think about this is if you go into a group of cows and you just close your eyes and listen, if you hear slipping and sliding, you've got poor cow flow. Now it might be because of poor stockmanship, it might be because of the dog running amongst them, it might be because you've got too big a stocking density, it might be cos you've got poor floor and slippery floors, it may be because you've got dead ends, but whatever, that is all poor cow flow.

As an overall sort of summary, good cow comfort is important for reducing sole haemorrhage and soul ulcers. Good cow flow is important for reducing white Lyme disease. There's gonna be some crossover, but this is like I say, just to simplify things.

So examples of what we'd expect with a nice good lion times and good cow flow will be well, designed sheds with wide passageways, good grooving and comfortable beds, and in a shed like this, you, you wouldn't get more than 15% of the cows as what's called waiting cows. Sand deep beds, good example. And again, nice lying times.

And not so good. We've got a lot of cows standing up here. I mean, it could be because the beds aren't as comfortable.

It could be because of heat stress that all needs investigating. But the point is, is you've got a lot of perching cows and standing cows, and these are waiting cows. Another example, a lot of waiting cows and perching cows and cubicle design is, is the problem here.

It's got a very short space between the, between the brisket locators and this lower bar is a, is a, is a nightmares for reducing cubicle acceptance on head to head cubicles. So, Important for cow cow comfort. And this one, God, it makes me cry when I look at this photograph, and I almost cried when I walked into the shed.

These cows, they absolutely were nervous as anything. They scrabbled around. They, they, they, they were, had very high prevalence of lameness, and the dog was running about them, and the farmer didn't even recognise that it was stressing the cows up.

So very, very poor cow flow, giving a high risk of white Lyme disease in a scenario like this. Tracks are important, not a very good track and a nice track. OK, moving on to the 4th 1 is EDPA, early detection prompt effective treatment.

And every word is important here. You need the early detection, you need the prompt, you need the effective, and you need the treatment. So, what do you need to get EPET, EPE?

Well, you need to have a system to detect new cases early. And for most cases, most farms that include, that really means mobility scoring and probably in-house mobility scoring to detect those early cases. Then an ability to respond quickly, we need good facilities, we need good equipment, we need good training, competence.

Etc. And this one is particularly important for all types of lameness. And there's some nice UK based research which shows that actually if the only intervention you do is, is improving EDPET, your lameness, whatever type will reduce.

So there we are, foot trimming, decent facilities, putting blocks on at the right time, using NSAs, straw yards for recovery for cows. And a summary diagram, pulling it all together. I said I'd just explain what the lameness map is and and how these kind of four success factors work in order to simplify what is a complicated disease.

The lahs map is simply this. It's a graph with 3 axes. And if we take the 3 most prevalent lesions causing lameness, dermatitis, white line and cell ulcers, and we map what the most prevalent or higher incident, lesion is relative to the others.

So forget your absolute scales, it's more the relative prevalence or instant. Compared to the others, then it helps a farmer see quickly and visually which of the success factors is going to be most important for their situation. These little diagrams here which which which show kind of a risk, a risk level for each of the success factors is on the back of the checklists which are part of.

Part of the risk assessment, but I want to just show you this for the, for the the lameness map, and farmers like that, they like that visual thing, they get it straight away, and it really helps them decide what to do. So the net result is, at the end of doing you, you, you, you visit 12, and 3, and putting all this together and doing the risk assessment and developing your, your, your lameness map and discussing with the farmer what's, what's important for them is that you get a mobility contract or an action plan. And the point, the important part or the important role that you have as a mobility mentor is to kind of tease this out of the team.

This is their plan. These are their thoughts, these are, these are their ideas, and they will come. They will come.

There's no need to dive in and tell people what to do. And they come on the back of the fact that farmers are intelligent people in any case, and people who work on farms are intelligent people in any case, and they know a lot already. And it comes on the back of the interest that you have stimulated in them and the questions that they ask you, you, and that you are able to help them with during the delivery of the programme up to this point.

So developing the plan, it's not the end, but it's the beginning. Sorry, it's not the end, but it's the end of the beginning. At that point, you can then start working towards implementing, monitoring, making sure things happen, and tinkering.

So, you know, things don't always go to plan first time round. You might have a great idea to, to, to. To put in place, regular mobility scoring to detect the new lame cows.

But, you know, maybe a couple of weeks into it or a few months into it, the enthusiasm drops off or the right person to do it hasn't been trained or isn't available. So these things, they need reviewing and, and getting right. So there's a quick kind of potted version of what the Healthre programme is.

It's a potted version of where it came from with the, with, with Nick's, research work and, and then the, the, I guess the, the, the, the influence that I was able to bring, I guess with some of my background and the health and the, the, Nuffield project and. How signals work. And Sometimes I have to pinch myself because the most amazing thing about the health fe programme is it works.

And it does work. And we're able to demonstrate that it worked. And I know some of the people who are online today listening were involved in this project.

It was a project involving 50 cows, sorry, 50 herds in northwest England, so mainly Cheshire, but also some in Lancashire. And we compared half of the farms that were doing the Health Feet programme. It wasn't a case controlled study.

It wasn't random. These farmers had elected to do the Health Feet programme, and we compared it with matched farms that didn't do the Health Feed programme, and we showed that That, the farms that we're doing in health feed programme on average reduced their lameness within a 12 month period of 22% and . That compared to the farms that didn't do the health feed programme that had no overall reduction.

All farmers made some changes, but the Health feed programme farmers tended to make more changes on, on average, it was twice the number of changes. So actually quite a lot of parallels there with the Touby project. And we found that the cost benefit for for farms doing health feed programme, even within that 1st 12 months when there was capital costs involved with maybe putting in some new, mattresses or changing the footpath, etc.

The cost benefit was 6 pounds 50. For every 1 pound that they invested in the healthfe programme and in the capital costs which they might have to do. And of course, as long as those improvements are maintained, then the cost benefit will be expected to be better.

So, that was our, I, I guess, little, validation that having put this thing together, we've got confidence that it works. Before talking about Health feet light, just introducing that as a concept, . One of the things that we discovered while doing that Northwest project and seeing it worked was, was we found, we wanted to see whether there were things in particular that we could recommend across all farms.

For example, was a certain foot bathing regime or protocol, particularly beneficial. So we, we tried to find, you know, the farms that had low levels of lameness, what were they doing? And we didn't find a single thing that, that joined those farms together, except the farmers.

Attitude towards lameness. And what we found was the farmers that had least lameness, they had a lower barrier score, personal barrier score, which we, which we, developed. In other words, they felt that lameness control was, was, was more in their control.

Lameness management was more in their control. So, so I illustrate that. If you're a farmer and you kind of think, oh well, I've got a lot of lame cows, but it's because the wind, we had a bad winter.

Or yeah, I've got a lame, a lot of lame cows, but yeah, the nutritionist is cocked up this year. Well, I've got a lot of lame cows, but yeah, it's because I had to hang on to a few too many because my fertility was bad. Then that farmer will have a lot of lame cows because they are not taking ownership of the problem.

They're not, they're not accepting a responsibility, but B, and importantly, they're not accepting or realising that actually this is under their control. And that was a really strong thing that came out of our Northwest study. And again, that is kind of how the Healthy Feet programme has been designed to work, is that the mobility mentor builds the farmer and their team.

Builds their self-efficacy. In other words, helps them to gain control and feel in control of the lameness problem and take ownership of it and come up with their own solutions which they implement voluntarily. And because they feel empowered to do it, then they do do it and they reduce lameness.

However, the uptake of the Health Fee programme has been disappointingly. Few farms. It works.

On the whole, mobility mentors like delivering it. But the phone is hardly ringing off the hook, with farmers ringing up asking for it to be delivered. Now one thing that was suggested some time ago was that it was too complicated, it was too big, it was too cumbersome.

It looked like it was going to be very expensive. So could we can, can I have an entry level sort of a taster approach? And really that's what Health toe programme light is.

So it takes the same principles. It's still delivered by mobility mentors because it's We feel it's very important that people who deliver this programme have had the training, which is very much about how to deliver the programme with the correct attitude, that that successful attitude, that thinking partner attitude. The framework can be reduced.

So that's where Health Feet programme light comes in. So it's reduced the barrier for the farmers, but it's also to reduce the barrier for mobility mentors. You know, we're all time pressed, and sometimes to think about delivering the whole programme in its entirety can be a little bit too much and so you don't start.

And the idea is to try and increase the number of farmers benefiting from the programme. So it's a 5 step. It starts with a preliminary interview or questionnaire, which kind of takes place of, it means that the, the first visit doesn't need to be done.

And it's, it's lots of open questions. It's just finding out what, what the farmer already does, what it already, what, what they already know, what they already understand about lameness, but also what, what motivates them and, and what they, what they understand about the costs of lameness and, and, and. Inevitably the farmer will, will.

Will be prompted to ask more questions because they're being asked questions. So that's the first part is the interview. Second, there is a whole herd of mobility score, just to give, just to give us a baseline, and I think we're in a much better position now in 2020 than we were in 2010.

When this was launched, because we now have ROMs accredited scorers, we have, so, so a mobility scorer is a thing now, whereas it wasn't before, it was just, oh, who could we get to go out and do the mobility score? Now mobility scorers are kind of, you know, these are, these are valued, valued members of veterinary teams and, and, and also working outside vet practises who deliver this, service. So that's a great thing, great thing to have now, that we didn't have before.

Step 3 is, is to have a look at, you know, what, what, what records are available, but just to ask the farmer, you know, what, what do you think your main lesions are? It can be as simple as that. Just a simple question, what do you think your main lesions are?

And then on the back of that, you can decide which of the success factors you're going to investigate in some degree of detail. And you only need one visit for this, and it shouldn't take any more than a couple of hours. So if your main problem is so ulcers, you're going to look at cow comfort, body condition score, foot shape.

And EDPET, we are recommending that healthy proli for every type of lameness Ed pet is considered. So that's early detection, prompt effective treatment. And this is just using the, the, checklists which are, are already in existence.

And then step 5 is doing that follow up. So at least, at least a telephone call at 3 weeks and then a review after 12 months to see how the farmer's getting on. But in reality, we would hope and expect that farmers, once they, once they make a start on the journey, they'll want to continue.

This is just a screenshot of how the questionnaire looks. So it's, you know, nice open questions and some pictures to say, what do you think this is and what do you think causes it? How much do you think you've got this, of, of this on your farm?

It's the sort of thing that if you don't fancy doing it yourself, and I, I don't know why you shouldn't want to do it yourself, if you want to use a vet tech or someone else in the farm, in the vet team to go and, and do the interview for you, then you can do. But it's, it, it, it's kind of a low barrier, a low entry level, thing. Farmers are introduced to the for success factors and how it works.

They are introduced to the, the balance scorecard or lameness map, so they can choose, you know, which are the success factors they want to concentrate on, and that, risk assessment or consistency of approach is brought about by using these checklists, and, and therefore developing a starting point. Of something to, to, for the farmer to get their teeth into, but still using those facilitation and coaching skills. So it's 5 simple steps.

One farm visit should reduce the barrier for farmers and increases awareness of what's involved. It should reduce the barrier for mobility mentors and starts that involvement, and it's likely to lead to a greater depth and ongoing engagement. And that's what lameness management is all about.

It's an ongoing process. It's not I just go in there one time invention, come away, intervention, come away, job done. It doesn't work like that.

And big journeys begin with small steps, and it's this small step to help people start the journey. So, I've gone over my time now, so I'm as guilty as Nick, but here we are. I hope that has been a useful summary of the programme and what HFP light looks like.

And now Nick and I are both very happy to take questions. Yes, thank you very much, both, to Nick and Owen. It is, it is bang on 9 o'clock when we're meant to finish, but we will stay online for questions because we have got lots coming in.

But I think you'd all agree, a really important topic, and both Nick and Owen have covered a huge amount of ground, and also shown there's quite a lot of exciting things to come when it comes to lameness. So please, this is a great opportunity to ask them both, . Any questions that you may have.

So please pop them in the Q&A box. I'm also going to ask you at the end of the presentations, just to spare 30 seconds to complete the feedback survey that should have popped up in your new tab browser. If you can't see it for, for, for whatever reason, then you can also email any feedback to office at the webinar vet.com.

If you're listening to a webinar, a recording of this webinar, you can also add comments in under the, under the, on, on, on the website underneath the recording or email the office as well. We really, really do value your feedback. So we have loads of questions coming in, for you both.

So we're gonna kick off straight away with one from, Giovanni, which is for Nick. Related to your healthy feet, project research, during the research, did you create common environmental parameters to standardise the farm, or was this more farm specific? I think I understand the question.

So we, we, we had a, a very, we had a systematic risk assessment, which contained a lot of detail, which, you know, that, that's, that's one of the things I like to understand on a farm to get to the, the detail. But then the, the, the, the facilitated action plan or the contract at the end. Would, would draw in some of the findings from that, but would convert that into something that was very farm specific.

So hopefully I've understood your question correctly. So I think it captured both a generic risk assessment that was then able to be tailored towards something that was much more farm specific. Brilliant.

I think that's, I think that's what the, the question was related to. So thank you very much. Maybe one quickly for Owen.

What advice would you have for a farmer who's buying, in cattle he got a flying dairy herd? What quarantine measures do you put in place for bought in cows? Oh.

I don't know if I can answer that. In terms of digital dermatitis digital dermatitis perspective, it, it, I, I presume. So it's always a risk if you fly in herd, obviously, and as a bare minimum, I would ask the farmer to lift the cow's feet and inspect them and treat any active lesions.

The problem is with digital dermatitis, as, as, sorry, you, you know well and you would know better than me, is that once a cow has been infected with digital dermatitis, there is an argument that she never actually recovers. So can you ever quarantine, a cow that has a digital dermatitis lesion adequately? I'll leave that question hanging.

I would, I would probably say, say no. I think we don't think we quite, quite know enough about it. One, I'll leave it up to the two of you who, who decides.

We've got a question from Ben here. One of the key drivers of improved lameness recently has been supermarket contracts. Is there going to be some industry-wide drive through retailer and red tractor, farm assurance to encourage force farmers to undertake Healthy feet programme as a standardised approach where mobility score is poor?

It understands obviously there's a negative attitude to being people being forced to do it, but would, would it essentially become the norm then if people are, sort of, encouraged to do this? Can I take that one, Nick? Yeah, yeah, go for it.

So, really pertinent question, and it's a pertinent because it, we are working on this exact thing at this time. In an ideal world, yeah, there is far more drivers pushing farmers, as well as pulling farmers towards doing the health fee programme and engagement. And that means that we need to have a better understanding of what the programme is and what it can do.

We're working with, The Royal Agricultural University, as Nick mentioned earlier, doing what's called a participatory policy development, which sounds very high flying, but basically it's just bringing lots of farmers together initially so that they have ownership of the policy and then presenting that to all of the stakeholders that we can think of, such as the supermarkets and the milk buyers, but also, policymakers, so Deer as well, to present. The farmers' ideas of how the industry, the whole dairy industry, should and could move forward to reduce lameness. So we're really working hard on that, Ben, and I really hope that we're successful, more successful than than we've been hitherto.

I think there's been just not enough recognition of what the health programme is and what it can do, and not enough recognition about what. Lameness, what prevalence of lameness is and how damaging it is to the industry both in reputation and also economics. I think Ben touches on a quite an interesting thought there that that could the perception of the Healthy feet programme be harmed in some way if it's been used as a as a tool within NATO, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And of course that's always a concern that I think we will have to look out for, but I think the the methodology is so supportive and producer orientated that, I would hope that it's Viewed as a, as a help and assistance even if it is a bit of a chicken and egg situation as well because we do need to have a good cohort of mobility mentors who can deliver this programme. And that's also something that we've worked hard on and it's taken 10 years, but we've actually got a cohort of of Over 100 mobility mentors that are well spread out throughout the UK. And it sounds like we've got a lot of people online at the moment who are keen to be mobility mentors.

We're really keen to build that cohort, because of course, a retailer is unlikely to say, you've got to do the health feet programme if the farmer says, well, where can I go? I haven't got anyone who can deliver it for me. And that leads us on really well to actually a couple of questions that have come in, regarding training.

So obviously we've got, COVID situation going on, so how much training is, is gonna be happening, . And, also, I'm just, sorry, I'm just picking up another question here, which is along similar lines, which basically ask how we become a mobility mentor and, is, is the information provided standardised for mentors. So maybe I can pick up and say, actually, that we've got some mobility mentor training.

It's run through BCVA. We have got some planned for September with Owen and Nick. However, obviously, that's under, under constant review.

Maybe Nick and Owen, you could just pick up on, on what the mobility mental training, involves. Yeah, it's a two-day course. It, it's usually now delivered by Nick and myself, and it's, it's a mixture of that facilitation and, mentoring skills and also some of the scientific background towards lame management.

So it's a nice little mixture of kind of technical and soft skills, with, yeah, . Does that answer it, Sara? 2 day training course.

Yes, and, in terms of going online, it's something that we've, we've all discussed, haven't we, trying to put together something, online so that we can, by the by the time we can do face to face workshops again, maybe we can reduce, reduce that, but that's something that's still in discussion. Yeah, and they run through the BCVA at the moment and the next one is scheduled for er did you say October, November, October September. And I think there's a good likelihood that's gonna go ahead, I think, isn't it?

Hopefully, fingers crossed, and we've also tagged a ROMs accredited, mobility scoring workshop on, onto that training as well as a result of, of feedback. We aren't gonna be able to get through all the questions. We've still got over, over 10 questions, to, to answer.

I don't think we're gonna be able to get, through all of them, but, I will just pick up on this one here, . Cos it's regarding the principle of mentoring and coaching through the Healthy feet, Healthy Feet programme. Obviously a really key component in making sure the farm's got ownership.

However, we have a question here, which is how do we achieve this whilst also ensuring that we're following the, the most up to-date evidence-based medicine. So for example, how are farmers meant to know that low body conditions for cows at risk of lameness and we've only just learned this from the evidence, or how do we intervene if they make a suggestion that is inconsistent with what we advise, such as antibiotic foot bathing for digi? Maybe I could ask Nick to pick that one up.

Yes, and, and this was absolutely my worry at the start of the Healthy Feet project that. Are we not going to end up with some quite dangerous things going on on farm? But actually that's where the, the, just by following some simple principles of facilitation and and it, it, it doesn't prohibit the, the use of advice, but you just, you need to be careful how you broach that and, and do it with respect.

But, but actually, just with the facilitation approach itself, it's amazing how you can draw out a, a, a, a sensible view using some of the findings that you've gathered through doing a risk assessment. So, The, the, the process that we take you through with the Healthy Feet programme is very much about identifying some of the, the major risk factors and converting them into success factors, and then picking out the ones that are gonna be of most interest to the farm to do. And through that process, you can guide them towards something that's going to be consistent with the evidence base.

So, I, I totally get the concern. But actually, when you go through the process, it's actually rare that you, you come across anything that you would consider dangerous or conflicting with the best practise. And, and in those situations, you, you'd probably ask permission just to say, well, look, can I, can I chip in here with a little bit?

But if you do it politely with permission, then you don't disrupt that facilitation process. Is there anything you would add, Owen? Well, only that it's very important that mobility mentors have a full understanding and, and, and I guess part of that mobility mentor training is just making sure that any myths that are myths are busted, and that everyone's speaking from the same song sheet with the most up to-date evidence base that we're able to provide, after the mobility mentor training.

Brilliant. Thank you both for, for such a, a comprehensive answer. Now, as I said, we're not going to be able to answer, all of the questions.

However, I could not let, I could not finish without asking this final question that's come in from, from Michael. Perhaps one for Nick, is over trimming an issue? On some farms, the trimmer is perhaps treating too many lame cows versus corrected trimming.

All, all OK if she, if she goes lame the day beforehand, but obviously not if there's a long lag time until treatment. What would your thoughts be? Yeah, that's a big one.

Thank you, Sara, and thank you for whoever asked that one. I'm, yeah, I'm, I think we're all aware that, there, there will be some over trimming and there's some absolutely brilliant trimming that's going on on farms. So, that's probably where, the use of data can really be informative.

And that is part of the Healthy Feet programme, so that, that is probably something that's been developed more than was in the original Healthy Feet project. And, so by looking at the data, you can really get some important insights. But I, I'm a very data-driven practitioner.

I know, I, I love data. That's, what I do day in and day out. So I would use the data to draw the insights, but it's Important we approach this very much as a team effort, and it's very easy to, to blame certain team members for this.

And by and large, most, most foot trimmers are wanting the same outcome as, as all of us that, we're wanting to improve foot health. So if there's anything that we can do to aid the foot trimmers' perception of what's going on and alter adjust, tweak what they're doing in order to prevent thinsoles, then, you know, they're going to be as much the beneficiary of that as the farmer. Fantastic, thank you, and it's great that we have got some foot trimmers online tonight as well, really, really important part of the, the foot health team.

. As I said, we're not gonna get through all the questions, however, what we will do is we will make sure that we get them answered, from Nick and Owen via email and then we can send them out to you cos there's some other great questions. That have come in too. So, we will try and get those answers with one thing, sorry, because I've just noticed a couple of people have asked about how to get, so people who are already mobility mentors and how to get their hands on this, on this more, more recent iteration of the programme.

And can you just, for those people, if they're not already receiving the newsletters as mobility mentors from, Dairyo, oh sorry, AHDB then please contact AHDB . Directly and there is the website or the sorry, the email address. I Nick, can you just remember what it is, sorry, for Janet.

Healthy feet at AHDB. I think that's it. Well done.

Thank you, Sara, because, because it's important that if you're not already on that database as a known mobility mentor, then that your name is known because through that you'll be, you'll be receiving regular emails and, and you should be newsletters and you should therefore be signposted in where to get the new materials. And say sorry, sorry, should we circulate that, should we circulate that to everyone who's attended? Would that be good?

Yes, yes, we'll do that. We'll circulate that with the answers to the questions. All of the resources that, Nick and I covered tonight are available to mobility mentors.

And also another question that came in was about healthy feet light, whether any further training is required. And no, it's all, it's all part of the, the normal, mobility mental training. So unless Nickovo have got any final things to add, I think we should probably bring it to a close.

We could, could carry on talking about feet all evening. But I think we should probably wrap up there. So, I just want to say, Nick and know, absolutely brilliant.

Thank you so much for staying online, you know, for, for so long answering questions, and we will, we will ask you to make sure everybody's questions are answered, after the webinar too. But also, thank you very much to everybody who's, attended tonight's live webinar. It's been great to have your interactions, some really nice comments coming through from you all, you know, great presentation.

Thank you very much. So thank you. Again, to, to Nick and Owen.

And I really hope that everybody can join us in 2 weeks' time. We are continuing with our fortnightly webinars, for us as part of our BCVA series. Next up we have Phil Elkins, who will be discussing transition management in 2 weeks' time.

So, once again, thanks Nick and Owen, and until 2 weeks' time, goodnight everybody, and stay safe.