Einführung eines Hilfsmittels zur Einschätzung der Standortgerechtheit der Milchviehzucht und -haltung auf ökologischen Betrieben

Summary

In organic agriculture site related factors of animal environment can’t be changed to a great extend by using remedies like additional food, concentrates and medicines as it is common in conventional agriculture. Therefore site related environment factors have a great influence on the possibilities of dairy cow breeding and husbandry on an organic farm. Non site related animal breeding can elevate the risk of (metabolic) stress and diseases in cows. The goal of this project was to introduce a new tool for advisers and farmers to estimate and ameliorate the site relatedness of dairy cow breeding and husbandry. The tool should help to characterize and compare “farm types” and “dairy cow types” and to judge if they fit together or not. 12 site related factors concerning roughage production and animal husbandry were chosen to char-acterize “farm types” and 9 cow associated factors concerning milk production, dairy type, height and weight to characterize “dairy cow types”. All factors are scored from 1 to 4. Low scores for farm type factors represent a low flexibility of the farm (extensive environment, poor roughage quality). Low scores for cow type factors indicate a high flexibility (robustness, unpretentiousness) of the cow type. On farms with many low scored factors it is of advantage to have animals with many low scored factors as well (and vice versa). The tool is programmed in a work sheet application (Microsoft Ex-cel). It provides a report for the farm, which shows a graph with all the factors and the percentage of the highest possible scores of all factors of the farm type and the cow type, respectively. The similarity of those two percentage figures can be applied as a standard to judge site relatedness of animal breeding and husbandry. If the cow fac-tors are scored more than 5% higher than the farm factors site relatedness is as-sessed as “weak” and should be improved. If the cow factors are scored lower than the farm factors the potential of the farm for milk production is not fully utilized. An example of such a report is presented. First experiences with this tool on 19 organic farms showed coherence between site relatedness of dairy cow breeding and longev-ity of the animals. The estimating tool was developed for conditions in Switzerland. It can be adjusted for other countries and regions as well.