Fernando Diaz
Consumer preferences along with animal welfare concerns make pasture access for dairy cows an important issue in the dairy industry. Generally, access to pasture does not prove to be an effective option year-round due to environmental constraints. In addition, dairy cows typically prefer to remain indoors during the day and go to pasture at night. Providing cows with free access to an outdoor pack may be an alternative strategy to pasture.
Two studies carried out at the Dairy Education and Research Centre (Agassiz, Canada) of the University of British Columbia investigated dairy cow preference for access to an outdoor pack versus remaining inside a freestall barn in summer and winter. The summer experiment took place from June to August 2016 and the winter experiment from October 2016 to February 2017.
The researchers (Smid et al., 2019) used 96 and 108 pregnant, late-lactation Holstein cows in the summer and winter experiment, respectively. The indoor area was a mechanically ventilated freestall barn with stalls spaced 120 cm wide center-to-center. The outdoor packs had a gravel surface bedded with a base layer of approximately 20 cm of sand and a top layer of approximately 25 cm of pole peelings, a by-product of the wood industry. The space available on the outdoor packs was 12 m2 per cow.
Daily temperature and relative humidity for the summer and winter experiment averaged 18.4 °C (range = 13.9–23.5°C) and 5.1°C (−4.3–13.5 °C); 72.8% (57.1–88.4%) and 78.9% (26.7–94.5%), respectively. The researched observed that cows spent on average 25% of their time on the outdoor packs in the summer and 2% in the winter. These values were lower than that reported in previous studies for pasture access indicating that the outdoor packs were less attractive for the cows than pasture. When cows were on the outdoor packs, they spent about half of the time lying down in the summer but only around 5% during the winter.
In conclusion, this study shows cows showed little interest in accessing the outdoor packs in the summer; however, motivation of cows to go out to the outdoor packs in the winter was very low. Thus, this strategy does not seem a viable option for meeting public animal welfare concerns year-round.
Reference
M. C. Smid, E. E. A. Burgers, D. M. Weary, E. A. M. Bokkers, and M. A. G. von Keyserlingk. 2019. Dairy cow preference for access to an outdoor pack in summer and winter. J. Dairy Sci. 102:1551–1558.
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