Lameness is a huge problem on Irish dairy farms and can seriously impact on costs and profits, and so identifying issues through locomotion scoring is crucial.
Once a cow is lame, forgetting about the costs to get her back to herself, the loss in milk production, poor reproduction and the loss of condition can have a huge impact on farm profitability.
A single case of lameness could potentially cost €350 – from loss in production, to reduced fertility, to the cost of treating and culling. More severe cases can cost even more.
Everyone knows their six -week calving rate, their economic breeding index (EBI), their replacement rates, their conception rates, their somatic cell count, and milk solids production, but no one ever talks about their mobility index.
Maybe this needs to change, considering the amount of lame cows in the country. By the time a cow is at the back of the herd with bad hooves, it is often too late and the lameness is usually a huge issue at that stage.
The best way of identifying these cows before they get severely lame is to follow them out after each batch at milking or scoring the herd through a mobility or locomotion score.
Locomotion scoring
More importantly than the economic impact of lameness, the cow is most likely in pain, so treating her should be a priority and then you can start adding up the costs.
By using locomotion scoring, lameness can be detected in the early stages, where there should be a quicker response to treatment.
It should also limit the cost of the case and reduce the amount of pain that the cow may be in.
Locomotion scoring is a five-point system based on both gait and posture:
- Normal: The cow is not lame; the back is flat;
- Mildly lame: The back is slightly arched when walking;
- Moderately lame: The back is arched when both standing and walking. The cow walks with short strides in one or more legs;
- Lame: The lame cow can still bear some weight on the affected foot;
- Severely lame: The back is arched; the cow refuses to bear weight on the affected foot and remains recumbent.
A cow’s hind foot should land in the same place as her front foot; failure to do this may be an indication of a lameness issue.
Identifying cows early will give them the best possible chance of recovery, as cows that are left too long to be treated can repeatedly cause problems down the line no matter how much work you do with them.
Another way of scoring lame cows is through mobility scoring which is also used quite regularly, and to be honest, it does not matter which one you use as long as mildly lame, moderately lame, and seriously lame cows are identified and treated.
The different score of mobility scoring are as follows:
- Score 0: the cow has good mobility;
- Score 1: the cow has imperfect mobility;
- Score 2: the cow has impaired mobility;
- Score 3: the cow has severely impaired mobility.
At this stage of the year, cows are doing a lot of walking on roadways and the prevention and management of lameness in your herd starts off by maintaining the quality of the cow roadways.
This in turn will be a huge help in reducing the number of cows that need to be hoof trimmed and treated.
New technology
The biggest drawback to locomotion scoring is getting the time to do it and organising someone to milk the cows while you carry out your locomotion scoring.
Quite often, farmers say that they do not have time to carry it out and claim they are able to see the cows as they are walking in for milking, which is not as accurate.
It is understood that a new technology called SmartSight is on the way to help farmers with this, which is an AI-driven innovation that uses computer vision to detect lameness in dairy cows at an early stage accurately.
Nedap have developed this technology and it apparently complements Nedap’s cow monitoring platform, which will be easy accessed and easy to use, saving the farmer time from standing out in the yard.
Nedap will launch this first SmartSight solution in the coming months, starting in the US and Ireland.
It monitors the locomotion of each cow using Nedap’s SmartSight camera and provides actionable insights into those that require intervention due to lameness and associated hoof health issues.
It enables farmers to streamline their operations and take proactive action to improve herd health, well-being, and productivity.
It seems that this technology could be a game-changer for the industry to identify lame cows early, to nip the problem in the bud early, and keep cows in full production, which may save farmers a fortune on treatment, culling, and loss of performance.
