Lack of place, what impact on animal behaviour?
In this farm and before planned construction operations, there is the equivalent of 0.7 fenced places per cow and 0.8 cubicles.
The performance of the animals is limited, both in terms of production and reproduction. When we look at the Feed'Live curves, we notice several things:
- Curves that fluctuate a lot (lack of stability in the ration and strong differences between animals)
- Low ingestion and rumination times.
When we look at the cows' schedule, several elements are characteristic:
- The percentage of cows ingestion after milking is less than 50% (whereas there is no more ingestion at night).
- Many cows are in other activities during the day, meaning that they are on the move (waiting for a place at the feeding).
- Few cows are lying down, even at night (less than 40% of the cows lying down at most).
These characteristics are visible with short mealtimes (8 meals of 30 minutes each), and also low lying periods (10 periods of 43 minutes each).
In the end, we can see that there are large differences in lying and eating times between animals. Primiparous animals therefore seem to be the most affected by these stress factors.
To try to reduce the impact, the farmer decided to distribute the ration twice a day until the work was completed.
