Latest / Talking Dairy / Cow wellbeing at the leading edge | Ep. 113

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Cow wellbeing at the leading edge | Ep. 113 · Talking Dairy

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: Kiora and welcome to Talking Dairy.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host Jack McGowan from DairyNZ.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's great to have you with us.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_02: When it comes to caring for our cows, New Zealand dairy farmers already do a lot.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: Our animals spend most of the year outdoors where they've got space to move and they're comfortable in their environment.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: But as global markets and consumers ask more questions, it's becoming more important to show the care that's already happening on farm.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: In this episode, we're talking about how animal care helps keep New Zealand dairy competitive and how new research and tools, including wearable tech, can help us stay ahead of the herd.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: That's where DairyNZ's Enhanced Animal Care program comes in.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's focused on keeping New Zealand internationally competitive in animal care, grounded in science and future ready.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: More and more people want to know not just what we produce but how we look after our animals.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: This programme of work is designed to help us do just that.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: Joining me are Penny Timmer Ahrens, who leads the Enhanced Animal Care program, and Dr.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: Stacey Hendricks, a dairy and Z scientist working on cow health behaviour and welfare.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: Together they'll unpack the research, the opportunities, and how technology, like wearables, could help farmers show the great care already happening on farm.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_02: Let's get into it.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: Tina Kurua, welcome back to Talking Dairy.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_02: Both of you have been here before, but give us a quick introduction about who you are.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: Kirna Jack, I'm Penny, the senior animal care specialist at DairyNZ, and with Jenny Jaygo Look After Our Enhanced Animal Care Programme, where we're investing in tools and resources for farmers, so things around like mastitis and lameness.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: We're doing policy advocacy on behalf of farmers to the government and also investing in research for sort of current risks and future opportunities.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: And Stacy?
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: My name's Stacy Hendricks, and I am a scientist, and I'm based in the Lincoln Dairy and Z office, and I work in the science team predominantly in animal science.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm quite involved in the Enhanced Animal Care program across several pieces of work.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: But predominantly the work that I'm involved in is both targeting some of the challenges that farmers are facing in terms of trying to reduce some of the risks within our system.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: So things like heat stress, which we'll talk about a little bit in this episode.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I also work in sort of the more future focused space.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that's looking at opportunities that are on the horizon.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: How can we continue to improve or continue doing the great things that we're doing on farm when it comes to animal care?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Penny, there seems to be many different ways people talk about looking after animals.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_02: We hear words like welfare, well-being, stockmanship, care, and more recently, sentience.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_02: What do these terms actually mean and how do they fit together?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: I guess thinking about animal care, it's the care farmers are providing.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's that husbandry and stockmanship, those things they're doing to make sure their cows are fed healthy and comfortable, they've got preventative plans in place, they're monitoring and they're finding animals and treating them.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: So it's the thing farmers are doing, and we tend to talk about animal care at DNZ because we're here to support farmers to farm well.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then welfare or well-being is sort of the outcome of that, that care plus other factors.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: And those other factors which make up sort of animal welfare, we can look at there's a model called the Five Domains model, actually developed in Massey University in New Zealand, but is now used internationally.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: And those other domains that we're looking at are nutrition, health, environment, and behaviour.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you're kind of meeting a cow's needs across those domains, she'll be experiencing positive welfare.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then as science advances, we're sort of gaining a better understanding of animal sentience.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: So recognising that they have feelings and their world and their experience matter to them.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's where kind of the shift that farmers will be hearing around positive welfare and those language of things that matter to cows, so like comfort and pleasure and other things like frustration.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: So those kind of feelings and I guess cow emotions.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's sort of coming through to having a good life for animals, not just avoiding kind of negative health impacts.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: And sort of an example to try and make that a little bit more real, because that was a bit of a word salad, is if we think about calf shed flooring.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: So there's been research done, calves raised on stone flooring versus wood chip flooring have very similar health and productivity outcomes.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: So in terms of disease and weight gain and growth, very similar.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: So you're meeting those kind of basic welfare requirements.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: But calves reared on stones are less likely to engage in play behavior and they're a little bit colder.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: So they can't kind of run around.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: They don't have that confidence in their footing versus calves on wood chips, which you'll see a mob of 20 calves sort of doing a bit of a zoomies and houring around the shed, so they can have access to that positive behaviour, even though those kind of health and productivity metrics are much the same in both of those settings.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: Because I'm a bit of a policy nerd and tend to think about the Animal Welfare Act, and Stacy's a technical expert in the animal welfare science domain, we turn to default to animal welfare, which maybe has a little bit of a negative connotation, which is where I think well-being can be a really useful framing of talking about positive welfare.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, welfare and well-being are interchangeable.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And then I guess the key idea behind all of these terms in language is the same, trying to pull it together.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, animals are cared for and their experiences matter.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Penny.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: Now, Stacy Penny has talked about how our understanding of animal care has evolved from that idea of just thinking about making sure they're not having negative experiences to actually recognizing they need positive experiences.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: Stacy, you've been looking into what's driving those expectations, both here and overseas, and you've spoken with milk processors, industry groups, and researchers.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: From your perspective, why is it important for New Zealand farmers to maintain their high standard of animal care?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, as you've alluded to, we've gone and brought together perspectives from different groups across the sector, so milk processors, industry groups, and researchers.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: A bit of work that we've done in DairyNZ as part of a project to try and understand what like the top five factors are that are keeping New Zealand's dairy sector competitive internationally, identified animal care as one of those top five factors.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: So that really tells us that animal care and the standards that we uphold are really part of our reputation and what we're actually known for globally.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of one key component of what's really allowing us to understand where we sit internationally.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: But alongside that, there's also been research undertaken about consumer preferences.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of research groups have undertaken work in this space, but in particular, one that's close to home is the Ministry of Primary Industries, does some industry insight reporting, and they looked at consumer preferences and identified that consumers value products that come from animals that are well cared for and that are living good lives.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so animal welfare is seen as a core product attribute.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not just about milk quality anymore, it's about how that milk is produced, and that's what people are willing to pay for.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: And that's being really reflected and recognised by milk processors.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: You will have seen potentially some of the initiatives around sustainability and also animal care is being captured within that.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: So some milk processors are rolling out programs where their farmers have access to higher milk prices.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: So an example of that is Fonterra's Cooperative Difference.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Sinlei's got a similar program called Lead with Pride.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And this is giving farmers an ability to have a formalized like plan on farm.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: So animal well-being plans, for example, that are allowing them to then report back to their customers and show in a credible way that we're providing great preventative care on farm.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: So bringing together these insights from like these different areas really reinforces to us that what is good for animals is good for our markets, and it's really important for the long-term sustainability of our sector.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_02: So now we know why animal care is important, and our ambition, of course, is to stay internationally competitive.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: Penny, how do we actually know where New Zealand sits compared with other dairy systems around the world?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_01: So we've developed a global framework for classifying cow well-being on dairy farms using eight characteristics that sort of contribute to cow well-being.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: Another framework farmers will already be familiar with is our farm production framework.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: So that classifies whether you're sort of a system one to five based on your feed resources.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: This is sort of a similar approach, but trying to understand the characteristics that influence cow well-being.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then we can make comparisons across sort of New Zealand, the US, Ireland, and China.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: We can kind of look at different dairy systems across those characteristics to get a bit of an understanding of where we sit and depending on where kind of the future goes and what consumers value, what we're kind of prepared to capitalise on and really take advantage of.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's a story in the November issue of Inside Dairy around the typology work, which has a diagram, which I think makes it a little bit easier to understand.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: But just picking one of those characteristics is we looked at milking frequency.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so cows could be milked once a day, twice a day, some sort of variation of flexible milking, three to three times a day, which is does happen in those sort of really large US dairy farms.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: And the amount of time a cow spends at milking impacts the amount of time she has to spend being a cow.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: So if you're milking three times a day, she's probably spending a lot of time being milked or grazing or, you know, eating a lot of food to keep up with that milk production versus a farmer who's maybe once a day or more of a sort of flexible milking strategy.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: She's got more time to be a cow.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: She won't be as highly driven to eat.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, she might spend more time lying down, ruminating, um, having social interactions, doing sort of things that are important to cows.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess using this global typology, it also identified that every system has some trade-offs.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: So those highly managed or house systems can protect cows from heat and cold.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're indoors, they've got shelter all the time, but it might restrict some of their movement or natural behaviours, um, like LBL to sort of lie flat out on their sides.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas pasture-based systems are really good for allowing that freedom of movement and grazing and exploration.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we've seen cows out in the paddock having a scratch on a post, but it does expose cows to environmental stresses, so really hot weather or prolonged um wet and cold weather.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess regardless of what system you're in and what potential restrictions are placed on cows, that good management and pharma care is always going to be really key to achieving good welfare, kind of regardless of what your infrastructural resources are.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: So against the a backdrop of changing consumer expectations, as Stacy spoke about it, people are interested in how their milk is produced and how those cows are looked after.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: We're really well positioned to take advantage of that customer demand for like kind of naturally produced milk.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: People like that our cows are raised outdoors.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of at that international comparison level.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: But then to try and better understand the challenges and opportunities at a farm level, we created a different tool again, which Stacy can talk about.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, Stacy, let's do that.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_02: We've talked about how New Zealand farms compare internationally based on system level characteristics, but what about at the farm level for pasture-based dairy farms?
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_02: What are the things on a day-to-day basis that influence how cows actually experience their lives?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: What Penny had talked about was really about comparing our farm systems internationally at kind of a higher level, but obviously we have to recognise that not every farm system in New Zealand is exactly the same.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And they'll have differences in terms of how they're resourced, the climate that they're within, and how they manage their system, which will influence how a cow experiences her like day-to-day.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: So effectively, the purpose of the work that I'm going to talk about is that we wanted to really try and characterize across a subset of New Zealand farms, like what does our average farm system look like?
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: And how does it maybe differ across farm systems?
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so we wanted to capture where are the opportunities to enhance cow well-being in terms of what are some of the opportunities that farms can already provide or are already providing, and maybe there's some farmers that are already ahead of the curve, and can we use some of that information to guide other farmers to get to the same sort of place, or also highlighting where there are risks within our systems, and obviously that's going to be dependent on the individual farm.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: But if we could capture risks that like are consistently happening across the board where there are a large number of farmers that are maybe experiencing challenges within certain areas, that would give us a little bit of an indication in terms of where we might need to focus our attention to ensure that we then can really maintain that international competitiveness when you take it sort of upper level, but also to help on the ground like improve animal care and support farmers with the right tools and resources that they need to actually address some of these challenges.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: So, actually, to start off with, to try and actually characterize this and understand where those opportunities and risks are, we had to go out and firstly develop a bespoke tool effectively.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: So we designed what we've called the Cow Quality of Life Assessment Tool, and that's been designed specifically for New Zealand's pasture-based systems.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason we did that is because while there's been similar work done in house systems, we couldn't just take that same tool from a house system and put it into a pasture context because we had to acknowledge that, you know, there are differences between our systems, with one key difference being the seasonal nature of our systems, where we are carving in seasonally concentrated time frames, and then you add on a layer of cows being outside, and you've got to contend with the weather.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so that adds some complexities into the farm systems that we're managing.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we started off by developing the assessment tool based on the five domains framework, which Penny talked about earlier.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: So this is really to capture a holistic picture of a cow's lived experience.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: So the four key functional domains are nutrition, environment, health, and behaviour.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: And basically, the five domains model really reflects that within each of those areas, they all have can have a different effect on an animal's lived experience.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: We based our framework on those four key areas.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then we also had a farmer workshop while we were developing this tool.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: And during that sort of preliminary phase of development, we got some pharma feedback that they felt one area that was really missing was the people area, and that was to recognise that staff experience and staffing levels across the season can really impact our ability to provide certain levels of animal care.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we went and um tweaked our original pilot tool and we added in that fifth area, and then we went over to more than 200 farms and we sat down at the kitchen table with a range of farmers and questioned them with a questionnaire about their care practices across the season.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the actual tool we developed captured 21 different areas of the farm system, and then using the questionnaire, we asked them different questions about the different challenges and opportunities that they had throughout the year, and we then scored each area a low, moderate, or high risk.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: So the purpose of doing that was to really capture periods of the year like recognizing that seasonal influence where, for example, staffing levels, perhaps it's more of a low risk that you don't have adequate staffing levels to meet your animal care needs during the autumn period, for example.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: But come springtime when you've got all your cows carving within sort of a 12-week window, you've sort of maybe got additional pressures on your farm system, and that might impact your ability to actually provide the level of care you need, also given that you know it's a time where you've got higher rates of transition cow diseases and things like that.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: So that was really great to see that we were able to kind of capture those unique differences within our system.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: But in terms of the results overall, we were able to highlight that 85% of those areas were low risk across all seasons that we captured.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: So some examples of those were that we're we tend to see that we seem to be feeding our cows well, we're providing them with high quality feed throughout the year.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: We're very proactive in terms of dealing with health issues.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: We're providing adequate space for animals to graze freely, and we're allowing them with opportunities for social contact with their herdmates.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: We did, however, identify a few potential areas for improvement.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: And these are relatively well known, I think.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: So seasonal challenges that farmers are probably well aware of.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: So issues around staffing, as I sort of alluded to in the springtime, for example, potential challenges around providing adequate lying surfaces that are dry and comfortable throughout the season.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, particularly for those farms that are maybe in quite cold and wet areas or they're wintering on crops.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: And then another key area we identified was heat stress risk.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is obviously really restricted to summer and potentially maybe a bit of autumn, depending on what region you're in.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: But really, these highlighted areas that both farmers and dairy and Z are already working to improve, but it gives us the opportunity to focus on where we can put future research resources so that we can improve these areas further and provide farmers with the tools that they need to address these challenges.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: Penny, Stacy has highlighted some of the challenges inherent to the pasture-based system in New Zealand.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: So heat stress, lying surfaces, and staffing levels.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: Can you give us an example of how farmers can kind of tackle those areas?
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, because their system level risks, they're not easy to solve.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think if we could control the weather, that would be a really simple solution.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, unfortunately, uh unrealistic.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, obviously they're connected to lots of parts of the farm system and there isn't a quick fix.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess taking uh comfortable lying in winter, um, Southland and Otago farmers in particular have done a lot of work on this over the last sort of six to seven years.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: But it wasn't simple.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't just, oh, we'll replace this crop with grass.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: That has impacts on feed availability through winter.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to impact how much balads you need to cut through the rest of the year to be able to feed your cows.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Do you need to change the body condition score that you dry off at because you're not going to be able to put on as much?
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: What's your soil structure?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: What's your land type?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: What can you grow?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: What can't you grow?
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's not simple.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so farmers have made really great progress, but it's taken time and it's taken, I guess, iterating their systems over years.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: And we do actually have some information on that.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: We've surveyed farmers and we know they're doing some really good stuff around managing their critical source areas, backfencing, portable water troughs, having plans in place for their staff to shift the cows, you know, when the soil gets to a particular condition.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: So they've done a lot of work in that space already.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, just belying the point that it wasn't easy.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then heat stress is probably the next one where we know with climate change modelling that it's going to become more of a challenge.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's it already is, but it's increasingly going to become something farmers need to grapple with.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's something like 67 heat stress days a year in the Waikastor.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: So part of the Enhanced Animal Care Programme is a project called Comfortable Cows Outdoors, led by Dr.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: Charlotte Reed, and that is looking at doing the research to understand what mitigations work and how farmers can practically apply them.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: Keeping our cows outdoors is great.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's a real competitive advantage, as we've sort of already discussed.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, then managing the heat load in summer can be quite challenging.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: So in the Comfortable Cows Outdoors project, we're going to be doing a trial this summer comparing shade with sprinklers with altered milking times to see how do those mitigation strategies stack up.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_01: I guess the gold standard for heat stress is shade, it cuts the solar radiation.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: But it's not really practical to tell farmers to plant shade on every square hectare of their farm.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: That would be a kiwi fruit orchard, which, yeah, really shady, but not conducive to milking cows.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: And also there's different regional differences.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, based on some previous modelling that we've done, we think the Y cartou, Bayer Plenty, and Canterbury are most likely to have more heat stress days.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: Canterbury, with its large farms and center pivot irrigation, will need different solutions to Y Cartour.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: So solving the sun, or I guess impacts of heat stress on cows, is going to take different tools and different ways of integrating them into the farm systems.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: The comfortable cows outdoors trial that you're talking about, Penny, that's something that farmers have been asking for.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know, more information about what mitigation options are the best ones to use in their context.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: So that's really cool to see that coming to fruition this summer.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: I'm very excited to see the outcomes of it.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so we know New Zealand farms are already doing really well in lots of areas, and our outdoor systems give cows space to move and graze and be comfortable.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_02: But traditional welfare measures don't always make it easy to prove that.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: Stacy, can you talk us through how we assess welfare and how the science we're doing now is helping us to be future ready?
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I'll talk first a little bit about how we traditionally have measured welfare.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: So you may or may not have come across the term animal-based measure, and two other key measures to measure welfare are resource and management-based measures.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: So animal-based measures are seen as the gold standard.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Resource and management-based measures are still helpful, but effectively they don't necessarily tell us how that animal is experiencing her environment.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: So an animal-based measure can really tell us about something that's already happened or is happening to an animal, whereas a resource and a management-based measure, they're both kind of situational.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: So it's more about what that animal has access to, but it doesn't necessarily mean that she's going to access that resource.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: So if I give you an easy example, an animal-based measure that we already use on farm quite commonly is body condition score.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we go out and we assess the body condition of our animals, and that can usually tell us if, for example, the body condition score is a little bit lower than we'd expect.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: That might indicate that that animal is sick, or that, you know, she's just immediately post-carving and she's lost quite a bit of body condition score and she's mobilized a lot of body condition to support her milk production.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: So they don't necessarily inherently tell us if it's a like a normal outcome or if it's a negative one.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: In the case that if she's sick, you know, you might need to do something about that.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: But in the case of her being a little bit light post-carving, you know, just ensuring that she's got adequate uh high-quality feed is what you'd sort of do to support that.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, it does still tell you how that animal is being impacted at the time.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in the case of a resource-based measure, so that could be, you know, how much feed is available to an animal, or that she has actually got a range of different options available to her in terms of different feed types.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: So that can still be an indicator of welfare and that, you know, generally high quality feed availability is a good welfare indicator in terms of that she's likely to be able to meet her nutritional needs.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: But if she's a sick animal and she's feeling a little bit under the weather and isn't able to eat that food or isn't able to access that food because she's having trouble, you know, getting up and moving around and grazing or has low energy levels, then of course, like that's only going to tell you so much.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where that animal-based measure really will tell you the full story, really.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the reason why we talk about animal-based measures being the gold standard.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: And of all of the different existing welfare measures that are out there, there are a lot that we use in both housed and grazing cows, but there are a lot that are designed specifically for housed cows and they're not so helpful in a pasture context.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: So, an example of an animal-based measure is something like coat cleanliness, which is often used as an indicator of the actual hygiene of a house system.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, when an animal is in a pasture system, if she lies down and it's a bit wet and muddy, it doesn't necessarily indicate something negative.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: So some of these indicators, you know, you can't necessarily just apply them from one system to the other.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we've done a bit of a literature review to look at all the different animal-based measures that are out there.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of them are, as I mentioned, only really applicable to housed cows.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: But what we also found is that there are a lot in the nutrition and the health space, but there's not really much in the environmental and the behavioral space, which I sort of mentioned earlier.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like those are two additional components of welfare or an animal's experience that kind of give us a holistic picture of their welfare.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: That it's important that we can capture those elements, or otherwise, we sort of only have half of the information we need.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: So things like physical and thermal comfort reflect a cow's environment.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: But there are very few welfare measures that can actually capture how cows are experiencing their environment.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: And to my knowledge, there's very few that are actually animal-based that can be easily captured.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, like we could go and use a thermometer to get an indication of core temperature, but that's something that we could do as a point-in-time measure.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: It would require someone trained to come and take that measure at a certain period of time, but it's not necessarily going to reflect like that animal's lived experience across the whole season.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of these traditional welfare measures can often have limitations in that they are quite uh time-intensive to collect and are limited to a one-off.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that's really where new technologies like wearables are coming in and helping to fill that gap.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we've now got, you know, on-animal sensors like collars and ear tag sensors that can measure things like lying time, rumination time, and activity.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then we've got rumen boluses that can measure rumen temperature.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so when then you capture those animal-based measures through sensors and you combine that with other information like weather data, it gives you the opportunity to have this continuous animal-based measure that you can also combine with environmental data to really get an idea of how a cow is coping to her environment and get an indication of her physical and thermal comfort through, you know, aspects like is she spending time lying down and is she lying down for a considerable amount of time, which could give you an indication that she's physically comfortable, and looking at things like room and temperature, you know, is it staying within normal ranges that we'd expect for dairy cows?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that gives you an idea of her thermal comfort.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, our goal using these technologies is to really build a proof of concept of how that technology could allow us to develop new animal-based measures, and that will help address some of those challenges of traditional measures so that we can capture things like physical and thermal comfort, which we know are actually some really key benefits of our system.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like most of the year, our cows actually are physically and thermally comfortable, and they've got access to large areas of pasture where we know they like to lie down and they can sort of sprawl out, lie on their side and bathe in the sun.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's really beneficial for their well-being.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that's something that consumers like to see.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: But we also know that it's a challenge within our system where you know we do have periods where cows might experience heat stress, and we've talked also about like suitable lying surfaces as well.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: So being able to kind of capture that through technology could allow us to both demonstrate our benefits of our pasture based system, but also help us capture some of those challenges and then.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: Feed that back to allow farmers to actually provide animals with opportunities to mitigate those challenges.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: So this is the kind of science that really helps us to be future ready if we were in a situation in the future where our international customers ask for evidence that we provide high standards of care, and then we can use this to demonstrate that in a credible way.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Stacey.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_02: So we've talked about how wearable technologies can give us new real-time insights into cow welfare, but traditional animal-based measures aren't going away.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: Penny, even though they have some limitations, like being a bit time-consuming, how can farmers still use these animal-based measures on farm?
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I mean they're not perfect, like Stacy's sort of explained, but they are really helpful and we know farmers are using them.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: So keeping an eye on body condition score, lameness or signs of illness, it's going to let you pick up your cows who maybe need a little bit of extra help.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: We've just recently updated our lameness resources to incorporate some current science that's been done actually across farms in the Waikatsor.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so picking up lameness early and treating it with a block and pain relief, you can get, well, the study found like world-leading recovery rates.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_01: So a cow goes from being identified and treated to back to normal within 18 days, which is actually like really fantastic.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: So just doing those own kind of normal animal health preventative and identification stuff is still really helpful.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: And while we are, I guess, pushing into this future space of positive welfare and sort of opportunities for play and grooming and social interactions, that kind of nuts and bolts of preventing negative welfare is still really valid.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_01: I guess, you know, if you've got the flu and you feel really miserable, you probably don't want to go to a concert or a museum and do those kind of extra things that enhance your quality of life because you're not kind of in a space to go and do those.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: You're sick and miserable.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it's still the same in the animal welfare space.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: We need to avoid negative and then like add on top of that the positive welfare.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_01: So farmers are already using these day-to-day measures, they're looking after their cows, they're keeping records, they're working with their vet, they've probably got an animal health plan and some policies and procedures in place for their staff to follow.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: We're also starting to see farmers using both the wearable data and that more kind of traditional sort of health response.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, your collar might give you a health alert for a cow, but it might not be specific or particularly insightful, just you know, hey, you should check on this cow.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so then farmers are putting in place sort of, I guess, the more traditional measures like, all right, we'll draft her out and we will do a gait score to see if she's lame, we'll do a rapid mastoitis test to see if maybe that's the challenge, and just sort of an overall check of how she's looking, her coat, her eyes, her nose, combining the wearable data with that kind of really great farmer care that we know is already happening in the sector.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, you can pull that together and just keep making those small improvements to cow comfort and well-being, use the data and your observations to take the action on farm.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, you're going to have a really resilient and sustainable farm system.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_02: It should be said that even though you said the animal-based measures aren't perfect, I noticed there's still the gold standard, for example, in the heat stress research we're doing this summer, we're still having to do, well, not me personally, thank goodness, um, respiration rates at very regular intervals.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_02: But that's just not feasible on farm to do it, so which is why we look at new technologies.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's why we've got a summer intern working in the animal care program, um, who's going to be standing out in the sun with sunscreen and a hat, but yeah, doing those animal observations of respiration rate to match with the very large data set that we'll also get from the Roman boluses.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's a wrap for today's episode.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_02: We've covered a lot from what animal welfare really means to how New Zealand's farms stack up internationally and how both traditional and technology-based measures can help us monitor and improve our cow well-being.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: The key takeaway is that our pasture-based systems already give cows space to move and graze and live comfortably, sprawl out in the sun, like Stacy said.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_02: And yes, there are some challenges sometimes.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_02: DairyNZ is investing in research to provide tools and strategies that will help farmers address those challenges while keeping cows on pasture.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_02: That supports cow well-being and keeps New Zealand dairy competitive in global markets.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you want to dive deeper into this topic, check out the research story in the Inside Dairy November-January 2026 edition.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_02: You'll find it on pages 18 and 19, and we'll also link to some information in the show notes.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much to Penny and Stacy for sharing your expertise and thanks to you for listening.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: Catch you next time on Talking Dairy.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_02: Matewa.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: If you'd like to get connected with DairyNZ's latest advice, research, tools, and resources, whether it's reading, scrolling, listening, or in person, you can visit dairynz.co.nz forward slash get connected, and don't forget to hit follow to keep up to date with our latest episodes.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: As always, if you have any feedback on this podcast or have some ideas for future topics or guests, please email us at talkingdairy at dairynz.co.nz.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time on Talking Dairy.