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Grazing time for dairy cows
Should dairy cows get
some down time on pasture outside or should their lives be confined to the dairy barn?
Research by MARGARET EVANS
Well if the cows had their
way, time outdoors would be part of their routine. In fact, they made that pretty clear in a recent study led by Professor Marina von Keyserlingk, NSERC Industrial Research Chair with UBC Animal Welfare Program. The majority of dairy cows in the developed world are housed indoors with systems designed to meet all their biological needs for food, water, hygiene and shelter. But public opinion – including farmers’ opinions – suggest that pasture access would enhance that welfare and give them a level of life quality
that would include grazing, socialization and free movement. Yet, so few dairy cows have that option. “In the
United States, few dairy cows have access to pasture,” says von Keyserlingk. “Less than 5%
of the [10 million] lactating dairy herd in the USA is able to graze routinely. Unfortunately, we do not have any data on what percentage of cows in Canada have routine access to pasture or, alternatively, are housed permanently indoors.” The Canadian dairy herd was 959,600 cows on 11,683 farms in 2016. According to von
Keyserlingk, there are a number of studies done in North America, South America and Europe that have found that both farmers and people outside of the dairy industry see pasture
COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • JULY 2017
Professor Marina von Keyserlingk, NSERC Industrial Research Chair. UBC PHOTO
access as an important component of high-welfare dairy systems. “But farmers often perceive barriers to implementing pasture access on their farms, such as inadequate land or potential losses in milk production,” she says. “However, what is best from the cow’s perspective may
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not always agree with public or even industry perspectives so having a research basis that underpins recommendations is especially important.”
How they did it
To find out if pasture access is important to cows, von Keyserlingk and her research team investigated to what extent cows will work to access pasture by pushing on a weighted gate, and compared it to their motivation to access fresh feed. They found that cows worked just as hard to access pasture as they did to access the fresh feed, and they especially wanted outside access in the evening. Twenty-two late lactation Holstein cows were used in the study and they were tested in two phases. In Phase 1, they were tested in indoor pens with lying stalls, a feeding area and fresh water, and they were milked twice a day. Their total mixed ration (TMR) feed was corn and grass silage, alfalfa hay and concentrate mash. To access fresh feed, cows were trained on a weighted push- gate between two adjacent pens and each cow was monitored as to its motivation to push the gate open and access the food. They were provided access to the weight-gate 1.5 hours after each milking. In Phase 2, the push-gate was positioned between the indoor pen and the outside pasture. To make sure the cows were familiar with this test pasture, they were kept on it for five days before testing. The distance between the pasture and the barn was 12 metres and all the cows had exactly the same TMR feed.
The majority of the cows pushed as hard or harder to access pasture as they did to access the mixed feed. They actually pushed harder for
access to pasture after the evening milking than they did after the morning milking. “There are a number of
preference studies that have been done here and in the UK and collectively they report that cows preferentially use pasture at night but stay indoors during the day and during bad weather,” says von Keyserlingk. “One reason that cows prefer to remain indoors during the day is that higher energy mixed diets are typically provided indoors and feed intake is highest during daylight hours. As cows had free access to fresh feed inside the barn, our results suggest that motivation to access pasture was not driven by hunger but rather motivation to be outside and to engage in behaviours associated with outdoor access, possibly grazing and being able to lie down easily.” Dairy cows really enjoy the
mixed rations that farmers give them and they are highly motivated to feed after milking. In terms of food preference, there was no change in the amount of food consumed. The team had expected cows to show preference for mixed feed over pasture but instead they found no difference in the cows’ motivation to access both resources. In terms of the kind of
behaviours they engaged in outdoors and not in the barn, some cows were observed sleeping flat on their sides in the pasture, something they could not do inside the freestall barn. She says that the study has
received considerable attention from both the farming community and the lay public and some farmers have communicated that they have been incorporating pasture access in the summer months for their cows. The study was published in Scientific Reports this spring.
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