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A New, Practical Animal Welfare Assessment for Dairy Farmers by van Eerdenburg, Frank J. C. M. (author);Di Giacinto, Alice M. (author);Hulsen, Jan (author);Snel, Bert (author);Stegeman, J. Arjan (author) is a Agricultural and Biological Sciences article available to read on EtoBox.

What is A New, Practical Animal Welfare Assessment for Dairy Farmers about?

## Simple Summary To determine the level of welfare on a dairy farm is a complex task. There is no protocol available that can serve as a ‘gold standard’. The Welfare Quality protocol is the most extensive one, but it takes about a full day to perform. We, therefore, examined if it would be possible to replace the time-consuming parts, like lengthy behavioural observations, with simple measurements in the environment. This resulted in a new Welfare Monitor that can be executed in 1.5 h on a farm with 100 cows. Welfare assessment was appreciated by the farmers, and they responded to advice for improvements on their farm. Besides promoting better welfare, this approach also led to a better financial result for the farms. ## Abstract The Welfare Quality^®^ assessment protocol (WQ) is the most extensive way to measure animal welfare. This study was set up to determine if resource-based welfare indicators, that are easier and faster to measure, could replace the more time consuming, animal-based measurements of the WQ. The WQ was applied on 60 dairy farms in the Netherlands, with good, moderate and poor welfare. The WQ protocol classified most farms (87%) as ‘acceptable’. Several of the

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Author

van Eerdenburg, Frank J. C. M. (author);Di Giacinto, Alice M. (author);Hulsen, Jan (author);Snel, Bert (author);Stegeman, J. Arjan (author)

Publisher

MDPI AG

Published

2021

Language

EN

Field

Agricultural and Biological Sciences (Life Sciences)