Herd Health

With most animal welfare audits currently assessing bodily injuries to our dairy cows, there is growing interest into their causation and significance.

No one likes to see a lame cow – not the farmer, vet, employee, hoof trimmer, consumer and especially not the cow itself.

I have been a dairy nutritionist for over 33 years, and I am usually the first to know when one of my dairies is having hoof health problems. While many issues with cow health point back to nutrition, I have found that hoof problems, more often than not, stem from environmental causes rather than nutrition.

The C.O.W.S. program has been successful in working with dairy producers and their teams to unlock bottlenecks in their operations.

Cow health, nutrition and reproduction are key when trying to find the best options for the transition period of dairy cows. That said, there is a lot of information about nutritional strategies that can be tough to sort through.

When close-up cows are fed a negative dietary cation-anion difference (DCAD) diet, it induces a metabolic acidosis, which acidifies the urine.