Is animal welfare in Irish dairying really as

The drive to increase milk production by 50pc before 2020 and by 4pc per annum thereafter is well on track.

We appear to have a co-ordinated, well-oiled machine starting with the dairy farmer right through to the processor, retailer and ultimately to the consumer.

We are convinced we have the game cracked, the bedrock being our low-cost, grass-based production system enabling us to produce milk powder and butter cheaper that everybody else in the Northern Hemisphere, if not in the world.

But, have we really got it cracked? If we continue the relentless drive to cut production costs at every available opportunity, will it eventually come back and slap us in the face, like the bobby calf issue in New Zealand?

Approximately 80pc of the world’s dairy cows are in confinement dairy production systems so most of the world’s consumers visualise milk being produced from dairy cows in sheds or barns.

Some European processors are paying a premium price for milk produced from cows who spend a minimum period outside on grass – this means that in Ireland we have the idyllic system, our adverts of cows grazing lush green grass under clear blue sunny skies should give us a clear advantage.

Robust and resilient dairy systems of the future encompass many areas such as animal health and welfare, volatility of prices, climate change and social demands.

However, animal health and welfare appears to be the number one focus of European dairy farmers. Northern European dairy farmers in particular are acutely aware of animal health and welfare in their herds mainly because their milk is processed all year round into fresh milk products for immediate sale in local markets.

Processors demand high standards to minimise or eliminate the risk of ‘a bad news welfare story’ going viral and suddenly collapsing sales.

We are familiar with the advertising campaigns from vegetarian and vegan organisations with little or no supporting evidence, so imagine the damage they would do if they managed to acquire hard video evidence of a welfare misdemeanour from an errant dairy farmer.

So how do we measure animal health and welfare? We are familiar with recording measures such as mastitis cases, Somatic Cell Count (SCC) and Total Bacterial Count (TBC) in milk quality. But health traits are still a small part of the EBI breeding index, at just 3pc.

In the future, we could be looking at a statutory requirement to record Body Condition Score (BCS), the number of cases of lameness, metabolic diseases, retained cleanings, and so on, to satisfy the demands of a needy consumer.

Precision farming will enable much of this with sensors in animals, in sheds and outdoors to monitor climate, locomotion, rumination, heart rate, green-