41110069: Assessing welfare against progressive standards on continuously housed dairy herds in Britain: Questions & Answers

Q: Of the 20 farms that you envisage making up the group for this research, is there a preference between aligned and non-aligned milk producers?

A: The primary aim is to engage with a reflective sample of continuously housed herds. Ideally, these would be a mixture of aligned/non-aligned to reduce any potential biases. Where aligned, they should reflect more than one supply chain.

Q: The call refers to gathering data on the 20 farms using appendix 1 and then benchmarking. Is the benchmarking purely between the 20 farms, or is there another dataset against which the target farms will be benchmarked?

A: The basic requirement is to benchmark the 20 farms against the progressive standard indicated. At the discretion of the supplier, the overall interpretation contained in the report, may include reference to other datasets.

Q: The call references the ECO2 model for assessing resource efficiency. Is it a requirement, therefore, that ECO2 is used in the assessments?

A: It is not essential to use the ECO2 tool, provided the methodology is fully accredited.

Q: The call makes reference to an initial delivery period plus the potential for an extension to run until the end of 2019. Is there an indication of what budget might be available linked to that extension?

A: The extension is a time extension, if needed to deliver the project, recognising of some of the challenges involved in data collection. There is no additional budget above the ceiling indicated.

Q: Knowledge exchanges is included in the call as a key output; could it be clarified who the target audiences are and what the desired outcome is?

A: The target audience will be farmers who run a continuously housed herd including those that were involved in the project. At the very least, the findings and any case studies from the project should be communicated to raise awareness of the project.

Q: What is the definition of continuously housed dairy herds? If the ‘far off’ dry cows were grazed would this meet the definition?

A: As of yet, there is no industry definition of a continuously housed herd, for the purpose of this project it is expected that the milking cows will be continuously housed for their entire lactation.