A survey of practices implemented to improve cow comfort following an initial assessment on Canadian dairy farms

摘要

The objectives of this study were to determine the difficulty of implementing changes to improve cow comfort on Canadian dairy farms, to determine if any changes were implemented to improve dairy cow comfort following an initial cow comfort assessment, to categorize producers based on types of changes they made, to compare how producers in these categories differed, and to identify barriers to implementing these changes. The most difficult type of change to implement was changing stall design (including building a new barn) with a mean difficulty score of 3.3 (out of 5) scored by a panel of dairy researchers. Overall, 3 of 118 (2.5%) interviewed producers were categorized as innovators, 62 (52.5%) as effective adopters, 20 (16.9%) as ineffective adopters, and 33 (28.0%) as non-adopters. The most common types of changes made were to stall management (37.3%). Participants were asked to identify all barriers to further improvement of cow comfort. The most commonly reported barriers were lack of funds (52.9%), lack of time (38.7%), and being satisfied with the level of cow comfort (31.1%). This survey study demonstrates that a cow comfort assessment can influence dairy producers to implement changes to improve cow comfort; however, certain barriers exist to implementation.