People often say that the structural change toward larger dairy farms is bad for animal welfare. So, researchers looked at information from 3,085 German dairy farms with a total of 376,415 cows.
The German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture and the Thunen Institute of Farm Economics in Braunschweig helped pay for the 3-year project.
The number of dairy cows on each farm is going up.
In Germany, the average number of dairy cows on a farm went from 31 in 1999 to 70 in 2021, which is a rise of more than 100% in 20 years. One out of every five farms had more than 100 dairy cows last year.
The research sample was like the different kinds of dairy farms in Germany, which is the fourth-largest milk producer in the world. It ranged from 7 cows to 2,900 cows, with 122 being the average.
Most of the farms in the sample were conventional (98% vs. 2% organic), 97% were full-time farms, and 93% focused on making milk. The farm was 141 ha on average, and 73% of that was grassland. The average milk production per dairy cow per year was 8,810 kg, and 55% of the farms in the sample let cows graze.
Animal welfare index
Working with scientists who study farm animal welfare, farmers, and dairy representatives, the researchers made an animal welfare index that looked at housing, feeding, health, behaviour, hunger and thirst, pain and discomfort, injury, or illness. The animal welfare index also looked at how free the animals were to move around, how much access they had to outside weather stimuli, the type of cage and floor, resting areas, and drinking troughs. The animal welfare index was made as part of a bigger project about how to make dairy farming more sustainable.
The report talked about the difference between loose housing and tie stalls. On average, farms without stalls did a better job of taking care of their animals than farms with stalls. But the fact that animal welfare index values were all over the place showed that high and low animal welfare index values can be reached no matter what system is used to care for the animals. This is because some indicators, like the number of places each cow can rest, don’t depend on the dairy barn system and can stand in for other things.
Differences in the animal welfare index were found to be bigger within regions than between regions. There were also differences between herds of the same size, even though they were in the same region.
Results
The results showed that larger farms tended to have a higher animal welfare index than smaller farms, but the difference was very small. But, contrary to what most people think, larger dairy herds were not always linked to less care for the animals.
The study found that the animal welfare index varied a lot between herds of all sizes. This means that small, medium-sized, and large dairy farms all have room to improve animal welfare.
“Our results add to the evidence that the size of the herd has little or no effect on the level of animal welfare on a farm. So, when animal welfare is talked about in public and in politics, the focus should be on putting animal welfare measures in place on farms and less on herd size or restrictions on herd size that are forced by the government.
