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Characterization of Welfare in Dairy Cows Based on WelfareQuality Protocol in Portuguese Farms
D'Orey Branco, R., Brandão, D...
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The current consumers are demanding a new approach from the dairy industry. Today we need to assure the consumer that animal welfare is respected. In Portugal, the three largest milk buyers worked together to apply the Welfare Quality® protocol and audit all the farms that sell to our companies. The objective of this study is to characterize the current status of animal welfare in Portugal. We audited 456 dairy farms across Portugal with a number of milking cows varying from 5 to 1232. The main breeds here Holstein-Frisian and the crosses with Swedish Red and Montbéliarde. The audits were performed as described by the Welfare Quality® referential and consisted of the evaluation of the four main welfare principles: good feeding, good housing, good health, and appropriate behavior. These principles are divided into 12 criteria that allow the auditor to access animal welfare based on the animal and small input from the infrastructure. The combination of these inputs will create a numerical result. Farms results can vary from 0 to 100, being 0 the worst situation an animal can be, 50 a neutral situation of welfare, and 100 the best situation an animal can be in. However, results are presented only on the form of a) Not acceptable - 0 to 20; b) Acceptable - 20 to 55; c) Elevated - 55 to 80; d) Excellent >80. The final score is reached through a complex calculation. Data was collected from September 2019 to March 2020 using the digital platform WFQApp ®, this is a new tool to access the results from the protocol WelfareQuality ®. WFQApp allows direct data input reducing the human error and the desk time after the audit, it also allows the auditor to have access immediately to the results and the report to the farmer. Data was analyzed using the statics program R version 3.6.3.
The 512 Farms were divided in 4 groups based on the number of milking cows: very small 250 (n=18). From these 512 farms, we were able to audit in 447 farms to date, the results of these farms were: Not approved-10, Acceptable-177, Elevated -260 and none was Excellent. There was no difference (p>0.05) nor a correlation between the size of the farm and the results. The main reason for the Not approved farms is related to a low value in all the principles, especially on good feeding. Regarding the remaining audited farms, the areas most found to need improvement were increases in size and/or a number of water throughs and reductions of skin lesions mainly through better bedding.
In conclusion, this is the first large scale characterization of the welfare status in dairy farms in Portugal. The results show that 41% of the audited farms are below what is considered neutral for animal welfare. Therefore, there is still a long path to improve animal welfare in dairy farms in Portugal. This path should include continued auditing and farmer’s education.
Keywords: Dairy, Welfare, WelfareQuality, Cows.
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