Coastal farm working on cow mobility in grazing herd

The team at Caulston Farm in Devon has been taking steps to improve its herd’s mobility.

Located on the Sidmouth coastline, this 333-ha farm is long and thin, and the cows sometimes have to walk fair distances from grazing to the parlour.

Adam Atkinson, farm manager, is working with the six-strong team to make improvements to allow the cows to graze the farm and prevent ongoing problems with mobility.

Lameness affects approximately 30% of milking herd cows within Great Britain.

The average cost of an incidence of lameness, in terms of treatment costs, loss of yield, and potential for a shortened productive life of the cow, is around £330 per cow.

At current levels, that’s nearly £15K for an average-sized herd.

Caulston Farm has a milking herd of 600 spring-calving KiwiCross cows, focusing on milk from forage as well as cow health and welfare.

This farm is made up of shallow, sandy soils prone to drought which are very free-draining. As a result of this and the mild maritime climate, Adam has developed an extended grazing period of up to 320 days.

Around 20% of the farm is reseeded annually to meet the demands of the intensive grazing platform and forage requirement, which is around 11.5 t of dry matter.

Since joining AHDB’s Strategic Dairy Farm programme, the team at Caulston Farm has been looking at ways to improve their farming business. One of the discussed objectives was improving herd mobility.

Adam said:

“We currently have 8% of the milking herd scoring twos and threes for mobility, so we think there is room for improvement.

"It’s one of the main reasons cows are exiting the farm, other than not being pregnant in the block. There’s a big opportunity to improve this.”

Consideration of the lameness rate is important due to its impact on business costs and cattle fertility.

Lame cows are less likely to conceive, as their feed intake decreases, affecting production and making it more difficult for them to stay within the system.

Caulston Farm is currently managing its herd lameness rate through staff training. This includes training on moving cows correctly to avoid stress.

The team are trained to detect mobility problems while moving cows, during milking or at any other handling occasions.

They are looking into further staff training to help them detect the starting stages of lameness to improve treatment success rates.

Another way that Adam and his team are working on improving lameness is through mobility scoring. The team currently scores the herd quarterly but is looking to increase frequency.

“We're going to move our mobility scoring to fortnightly to try to speed up our detection rates and help identify what the main problems are,” says Adam.

“We can start identifying the risk areas in the system creating that problem, or look at patterns within our cases of lameness, such as digital dermatitis.

"This will allow us to alter our plans to tackle these problems and hopefully improve overall hoof health.”

The farm team is also looking to start footbathing daily. An auto footbath is being installed in August.

At the moment, footbathing takes place more in the winter months when the cows are on the yards, primarily to control digital dermatitis.

Footbathing more frequently will help them improve hoof health throughout the year.

Adam said:

“The final key area to work on is yard and track maintenance. This includes regrooving the concrete on the yards and looking into whether we need to add some more rubber matting.

"We are also reviewing all the cow tracks to decide which areas need maintenance to reduce the risk of slipping."

“We are working on lameness as part of AHDB’s upcoming mobility campaign with James Wilson, our mobility mentor.

"In our meeting on 26 September, we are looking to make a plan, with deadlines to monitor progress, and we are looking forward to seeing the results and improvements being made.

“The fact that we’re focusing on it is going to help us make headway for improvements. So rather than trying to improve a hundred different things, if we pick certain parts to focus on, we’re going to have bigger wins.

"And, as with most health-related matters, prevention is better than cure and it won’t be long until our efforts start paying off,” concludes Adam.

• Train staff to detect early signs of lameness and carry out regular mobility scoring
• Conduct regular footbaths to help with hoof health and reduce digital dermatitis
• Check grooving on concrete yards to avoid slippery surfaces
• Cow track maintenance – make sure the tracks offer comfort for the cows to walk on
• Ensure routine foot trimming to keep on top of hoof growth

Join us at one of our on-farm meetings to help you take steps to enhance your herd’s mobility while out grazing and boost profits and public perceptions.