Both white-line separation and sole damage increase on farms that have poor walking surfaces on the tracks, gravel on concrete or pressure herding on the tracks and the milking yard.
On many farms the long distances walked exaggerate all the other causes of sole wear.
What can you do if you have a sole or white-line lameness problem in a year like this, when there aren’t the funds available to resurface tracks? There are solutions to help reduce the foot damage that cost almost nothing. Cows’ feet are amazingly strong, so the key to reducing lameness lies in minimising the distance walked and reducing herding pressure.
What to do about long distances to the farthest paddock (greater than 1.5km)?
• First encourage the obvious – alternate grazing of close and far paddocks. This is really important with 24-hour grazing systems.
• Have a once-a-day herd grazing the distant pastures – lighter cows or lower-producing cows and heifers.
• Consider milking three times in two days if the production is 1.7kg milksolids or less, and SCC is less than 200,000.
• Let the cows out of the paddock earlier, then go and do some other job before gathering up the stragglers, or use automatic gates to let the cows walk to the dairy at their own pace.
Poor track surfaces:
• Let the cows walk home voluntarily with an automatic gate opener, or make it a farm-agreed rule that a herdsperson always stays at least five metres behind the last cow.
• If poor drainage is the cause of the damaged surface cut side drains as often as necessary to reduce water damage. Leave the grass verge to hold the edge of the track – don’t use herbicides or a back blade to remove it. Cut a drain every five metres, bringing the grass sod onto the track to act as a “dam wall”. Do this when bringing the cows home for milking.
• In problem areas run a two metre-wide sand or sawdust track down the middle of the track as a temporary measure.
Gravel carried onto the concrete holding yard from a poorly drained entrance area:
• The entry area needs shaping and compacting to allow the water to drain off. It ideally needs a 75mm transition capping surface, such as lime fines, over the compacted base that will absorb gravel and stones off the cows’ feet to reduce the amount carried on to the concrete.
• This can be expensive so some farmers are using second-hand carpet that they pick up free from their local carpet shop. They first run 50mm of sand over the re-shaped base material of the entrance area and then lay the carpet over the top. Ideally this should go 30 to 50 metres from the gate so as to absorb as many stones as possible. It needs a clean-down once a week to sweep some of the stones off.
• If wood chip is cheap and available, build a square with old power poles in front of the yard and fill it with wood chip 300mm deep.
Poorly designed yards, and yards too small for the number of cows:
• Train staff in low-stress herd handling – no shouting, whistling or pipes.
• Allow enough space in the yard for the arriving cows to change position from arrival order to milking order (Jersey 1.3 m2/cow, Friesians 1.5 m2/cow). In small yards, don’t close the entrance gate until some rows are milked.
• Don’t move a backing gate for at least 20 minutes.
• Slow the backing gate down to 12m/min in round yards and 6m/min in rectangular yards.
• Don’t move the backing gate for more than five seconds each time.
• Remember the backing gate is only there to take up a bit of space, not to push cows.
The key to reducing lameness is people trained to understand cow behaviour and to work with the cows and not against them.
All these ideas will reduce lameness at very little cost, apart from staff training and patience. Within two weeks staff will notice better cow-flow and they will also benefit from quicker milking times. Foot damage and subsequent lameness will decrease.
Neil Chesterton is a vet at Energy Vets Taranaki.
