RECORDING ALL LAME COWS - Why bother?
Prevention of lameness is critical to the welfare of your cows and to your bottom line. To reduce the lameness in your herd, you must first understand the nature and scale of the problem and this is where recording comes in, to identify and address the potential risk factors, assisting you to move your focus from treating lameness to preventing it - saving you time and money and your cows from the associated pain and discomfort.
If you are taking part in Fonterra’s Co-operative Difference program, one of the animal health plan requirements is to record the total number of lame cows treated during the season.
Easy ways to record lameness
It is important to remember this includes ALL lame cows examined, not just the ones that are treated with antibiotics. This can be entered in a couple of ways.
Healthy Hoof app
The ‘treatments’ section of the app allows you to select the point of pain on the hoof that needs treating, and the app will indicate the type of lameness. Treatments are recorded, so you can track the treatment history for the cow and any herd trends. All treatments can then be exported via a CSV file which we can use to calculate lameness incidence.
Minda Live
Once data is entered here, the data is extracted into Infovet and a summary of lameness incidence can be generated.
In this example; a farmer recorded all treated lame cows during the season and asked for a Healthy Hoof visit to identify risk factors for lameness in their herd. By recording all lame cows, we could analyse the data in Infovet and identify that:
Lameness was mainly occurring in mixed-age cows.
The time of year most lameness was identified was November to end lactation (especially April).
80% of lameness was White Line Disease.
All this information was a huge help in identifying key risk factors for lameness on this farm.