Improving animal welfare by assessing college’s farms

Summary

Health and welfare is a major topic in the Netherlands in both organic and non-organic dairy farming. This report highlights issues arising from welfare assessments conducted on Dutch farms producing milk for Ben and Jerry’s (B&J) ice cream. The Netherlands is the base for the European market for B&J ice-cream. Four years ago 11 farms were asked to produce milk for B&J. High human and animal welfare was a pre-condition. In order to evaluate the animal welfare on those farms, cows were assessed at the end of the housing season and at the end of the grazing season. At a plenary meeting the farmers discussed the results and the possible improvements on their farms. Since the farmers had a desire to control things on their own farms, they wanted to assess their own farms and animals. In a number of sessions a checklist was developed by the group of farmers and tested. This so-called ‘caring dairy’ checklist is now used in all kinds of farmers groups, conventional and organic, with farmers assess each others cows and farms. A 5 hour workshop at a host farm at the beginning of the process includes a theoretical and practical part and at least a proposal from the host farmer with three points to improve. The following assessments of colleagues take 3 hours per farm, which also results in proposals to improve.