YOU eat, drink, rest and hang around with your mates. Occasionally you do the sort of things that distinguish dairy cattle from human teenagers, namely chewing the cud and being milked.
Yes, it is a simple life being a cow and if you are not doing one of those things, it is quite likely that there is something wrong with you. That is what Joep Driessen says and, as a leading international authority on bovine behaviour, when he speaks, people listen.
Joep Driessen is a Dutch vet who, since 1999, has been teaching dairy farmers and professional advisers to watch their cattle and learn from their body language.
One would think that this would be second nature to a good stockman and particularly a vet trained to notice clinical signs of health and disease. But no, he believes that even the most diligent professionals will miss many of the key details or may misinterpret some of the others.
Getting it right is a matter of experience and training: “Cows are constantly providing us with information about their health, housing and care – and cows never lie,” he says.
Joep grew up on a dairy farm and after qualifying from the Utrecht veterinary school in 1994 he was naturally drawn to that branch of practice. After working for three years as a herd health consultant, he held his first workshop for dairy farmers in 1997 explaining the Cow Signals* theories that he had developed with his friend and fellow student of bovine behaviour, Jan Hulsen.
He maintains that by picking up the information that the cow is offering on its physiological and psychological state, stockmen can improve the animal’s health and well-being, and extend its productive lifespan. This in turn will increase both the financial and emotional rewards that farmers receive from their labours, he says.
So since then, Joep has presented his ideas to groups of farmers, vets, nutritionists, breeders and barn designers in 35 countries around Europe, North America and as far afield as Iran, Korea and Indonesia. Realising that there is a finite limit to the numbers they can influence through teaching small groups, they have formed a training company to produce Cow Signals-certified trainers in several states including the UK and a book which has been translated into 15 different languages and has sold more than 100,000 copies around the world.
Motivation
Joep is motivated both by a desire to improve the financial performance of his clients in the global dairy industry and to reduce the toll from entirely preventable diseases that limit the productive lives of their cattle.
In a normal situation, a farmer might expect his cows to reach their peak performance at around their sixth lactation. But in modern highperformance Holstein-Friesian herds, the cattle are likely to be culled by their third lactation – in Californian dairy herds the record is even worse, averaging only 1.8 lactations.
In contrast, during the past few years, the productive life of the average Dutch cow has been getting longer. Though Joep is reluctant to claim credit for this, his work in helping raise awareness of disease prevention measures is likely to be a significant factor. But as with their counterparts in other countries, Dutch farmers were initially sceptical that they could learn much from the training programme.
“Wherever I go they say the same thing: ‘We can’t do anything because we have no time and we have no money’. But the sort of improvements that we can offer will save them both, so there is no excuse.”
With the sort of training that Joep and his colleagues provide, stockmen become better at recognising the signs of disease and discomfort which affect the cow’s productivity, such as lameness or skin lesions caused by rubbing against the bars of an ill-designed cubicle.
The changes they suggest may be equally obvious – roughening the floor to prevent skidding, more ventilation and providing better bedding for the cows to lie down in comfort.
But the Cow Signals team also trains farmers to spot the more subtle signs that an individual cow is not happy, such as the hollowing of its flank when its rumen is empty. Another key indicator is a “waiting” cow, one that is spending time standing around, doing none of the simple behaviours that make up its normal routine.
Joep says this would include, for example, an animal that is standing half in-half out of its cubicle when it should be lying down resting and producing the milk needed to earn its keep. Waiting also includes time spent standing in a corridor, which often means that the cow can’t get to where it wants to go, usually because the route is blocked by a more dominant herdmate.
Redesigning the shed to provide more places where the cows can satisfy their basic needs for food, water, light, fresh air and comfortable resting places may require more investment by the farmers, but they will be rewarded with a healthier, more productive herd.
Changes in the basic management will produce the same effects. Joep recommends keeping pregnant cows away from the bulk of the herd from three weeks before to three weeks after calving. Being kept separately in “maternity hotels” allows the cows to avoid many of the stress factors which make them particularly vulnerable at this stage to diseases such as laminitis, he explains.
Only about 40% of those attending these workshops are actually dairy farmers, the rest are various professional advisers to the industry, including vets. In the UK and elsewhere, some of these practitioners have gone on to become certified Cow Signals trainers.
Broader picture
Joep says that the training gives all participants a broader picture of the cows’ needs and shows how they can help to meet them. “We have too many specialists and not enough generalists working with the farmer. Nutritionists, for example, look at the quality of the feedstuff but they forget to look at the cows. Vets are the same: they worry about cell counts and mastitis but they probably don’t bother with lameness and they may know nothing about the buildings.”
Joep maintains that being able to view a client’s animals from a different perspective gives vets much more credibility as advisers on all aspects of dairy health and management. He says farmers will place greater trust in their judgement if they can provide guidance on issues in which they don’t have a direct financial interest.
“For many vets, sales of medicines may make up to 50% of their income and that is not right. If they are truly independent advisers they should make their money from their advice – not from selling medicines.”
■ See www.cowsignals.com/cowsignals/eng/home.htm.
