Lameness Technologies-Improve your Herd Health and Productivity
Can Advances in Lameness Technologies Improve your Herd Health and Productivity?
Identifying lame cows is essential for herd welfare as lame cows ultimately reduce profits and productivity in the herd. Lame cows can be at a significant cost to a business, with the average cost per case of lameness being between £135 and £245, including treatments and productivity losses, dependent on the severity of the case.
Identifying these cows through locomotion scoring can be labour intensive and subjective, dependent on the scorer and their experience. The cows classified as a locomotion score of 2 and above are often identified after the infection or injury has taken place. This is detrimental to the cow’s fertility and production, reducing yields drastically and potentially leading to a spread of infection throughout the herd.
As a method of increasing efficiencies on farm, artificial intelligence and motion cameras can be used to the farms advantage, by potentially identifying early signs and hotspots on cows passing out of a parlour or a robot. This is a method of providing regular consistency, detecting any alterations to cows’ movement, which then is reported in an app.
Milk contracts using herd health data is becoming more common as a method for marketing and tracking the health and welfare of the suppliers herds, therefore many contracts are asking for lameness and body condition scoring. Using technologies to identify these individual cows reduces the staffing costs and enables a consistent scoring methodology. This analytical approach can identify changes in the motion of the individual cows to justify a change in scores or cows that need addressing.
These technologies can include:
- Herd Vision - This is a camera that sits above the cows as they exit a parlour or robot, it images the cow combining this with algorithms to identify body condition and lameness points. This then generates reports and daily cows needing to be looked at.
- Approximate Cost: £5,900 set up for cameras and equipment with an annual subscription fee to provide software upgrades and remote support.
- Pedivue - A camera that sits at the bottom of a race after a Hoof Count footbath, identifying issues as the cows move away from the race. This is a design that captures the progression of lameness, using AI to identify Digital Dermatitis, generating accessible reports. This technology is currently being advanced to identify the correct timings to remove bandages.
- Approximate Cost: £3,000 set up fee and then £1 per cow per year.
- The cost of these technologies is a sticking point for farmers. Although initial cost can have an immediate cashflow impact, the payback for example using the herd vison camera would need to save between 24 and 43 cases of lameness that would have cost £135 to £245 per case in treatments and productivity.
- Identifying signs of lameness within a week can result in a 91% recovery rate with minimal impacts on body condition and productivity. Whilst if cases go unnoticed for several weeks until the case is classed a score 2 or above, it can reduce the recovery rate to only 25% and has a detrimental impact on the health of the cow and its productivity, reducing the efficiency of a herd.