Month: September 2024

High-protein legume grain import dependency has placed Scottish organic producers in an unattractive position financially, and environmentally. High import prices and price-volatility can be avoided by producing legume grains ‘at home’. This approach also offers environmental benefits, as legume crop residues present a complex organic provision to help realise more holistic crop rotations. The potential is due to ‘biological nitrogen fixation’, a process whereby atmospheric nitrogen is ‘fixed’ into biologically useful forms. This is a function of the symbiosis between legumes and soil bacteria termed ‘rhizobia’. The benefits of high protein grain production are therefore allied to enriching crop residues which remain in-field. Here, protein yield, yield qualities, and soil-enrichment potential will be maximised using novel grain legume and cereal ‘crop mixtures’, i.e., cultivating multiple crop species in the same field at the same time. The project also tests the efficacy of elite-rhizobia to further optimise the protein yield potential

Animal welfare is an increasingly important subject gaining interest not only from veterinarians and scientists, but also from consumers. The public drive for higher welfare standards has increased the need for research to better understand the needs and nature of animals. Welfare assessment has typically focused on the elimination of negative welfare challenges (e.g. disease), whereas the recently established approach of Positive Animal Welfare (PAW) focuses on promoting positive experiences as an indicator of good welfare. Play behaviour is observed in the absence of environmental adversity, and as such reflects a good welfare state. Assessment of play behaviour can therefore provide veterinarians and livestock keepers an indicator of positive health, wellbeing and welfare. The introduction of motion sensor technology has allowed for detailed analysis of animal behaviours such as lying, playing, and feeding in a much less time-consuming manner. The impact of housing, socialisation, and play behaviour on future performance of dairy cattle has not been investigated. Therefore, this project aims to use accelerometers to investigate the impact of early life housing on calf play behaviour, and to assess the effect this may have on future health, performance and behaviour. The results will contribute evidence to the debate on calf housing systems and will aid veterinarians and animal health advisors when discussing housing and husbandry practices on farm.

Making better use of dietary protein would reduce the environmental impact of dairy farming and increase farm profitability. One way to do this is to target supplemental protein at specific periods of the cow’s lactation cycle. Specifically, providing extra protein just in diets provided during the first few weeks after a cow has calved may have longer term benefits for the efficiency of protein use and the production of milk protein. This has been demonstrated under controlled experimental conditions, and we now plan to test this idea using feedstuffs that could be used in practice on UK dairy farms.

The cost of helminth infections in dairy cattle in Europe and the UK was recently estimated at €941 million per annum, due to reduced productivity and the cost of anthelmintic treatment. The negative impact of helminth infections on the livestock industry is amplified by the global emergence of anthelmintic resistance to all three broad spectrum anthelmintic classes licensed for use in cattle against gastrointestinal and pulmonary nematodes and a widely used flukicide, triclabendazole, leaving farmers with reduced options once resistance arises. While resistance in gastrointestinal worms of cattle has received much less attention than in sheep, initial reports concerning reduced drug efficacy of pour-on products were published in 2009 and resistance to all classes is now thought to be widespread.

Coxiella burnetii is a zoonotic pathogen that can cause febrile illness in people and reproductive disease including abortion and stillbirth in livestock. In the UK, C. burnetii appears to be widespread in dairy cattle herds but the epidemiology and productivity impacts of infection remain poorly understood. Our study aimed to address this knowledge gap by generating data on C. burnetii infection patterns within dairy cattle herds, and to estimate production impacts of infection in these herds.

Funded by the Hannah Dairy Research Foundation and supported by the Journal of Dairy Research, Next Generation Dairying Workshops and Conferences stimulate dairy-related research in Scotland and connect researchers and industry globally.

The 6th HDRF Conference, Next Generation Data-Led Dairying will be held on the 18th and 19th November, 2024, in Edinburgh.

Abstract Submission is open (deadline November 4th) for sessions dedicated to short oral communications and poster presentations on any relevant dairying topic.