Source: UNIV OF MINNESOTA submitted to
STOCKMANSHIP TRAINING AS A TOOL TO IMPROVE CATTLE FLOW AND PRODUCTIVITY AND REDUCE THE RISK OF WORKERS ON DAIRY FARMS
Sponsoring Institution
State Agricultural Experiment Station
Project Status
TERMINATED
Funding Source
Reporting Frequency
Annual
Accession No.
1002926
Grant No.
(N/A)
Project No.
MIN-62-109
Proposal No.
(N/A)
Multistate No.
(N/A)
Program Code
(N/A)
Project Start Date
Apr 10, 2014
Project End Date
Jun 30, 2015
Grant Year
(N/A)
Project Director
Sorge, UL.
Recipient Organization
UNIV OF MINNESOTA
(N/A)
ST PAUL,MN 55108
Performing Department
Veterinary Population Medicine
Non Technical Summary
Our research goal is to identify new approaches to reduce worker injuries in dairies and to improve cattle flow and productivity on dairy farms. We hypothesize that stockmanship training will decrease the incidence of injuries of dairy workers and improve cattle flow on dairy farms. The objectives of our study are: 1) To prospectively describe the occurrence of injuries of Minnesota dairy farm workers, 2) Audit the current knowledge, skills and behaviors of the dairy workforce, and 3) Assess the impact of stockmanship training on worker injury frequency, stockmanship skills and cattle flow on Minnesota dairy farms. We plan to complete these aims by the use of webcams and in-person worker/cattle observations on 10 dairy farms with 400 or more milking cows. Midway through our observations, we would provide stockmanship training with commercially available educational materials. These would be language appropriate materials for Hispanic workers. Data collected include farm descriptive data (i.e. layout and production data), incident worker injuries, human and animal behaviors (i.e. cow slips, switch-arounds in the milking leadup, cattle vocalizations, worker use of prods, and worker noises). This unique prospective study evaluates the impact of stockmanship training on animal welfare, production, and worker injuries. These data will have bearing on future training and educational programs to promote animal and worker health. We expect that this work would lead to future funding and ultimately result in reduced injury of cattle and workers as well as improved profitability of dairy farms. Our hope is to garner funding to develop outreach and educational programs that promote stockmanship training for smaller dairies or family farms.
Animal Health Component
60%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
20%
Applied
60%
Developmental
20%
Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)Subject of Investigation (SOI)Field of Science (FOS)Percent
3073499310040%
3153410310020%
7235299302040%
Goals / Objectives
Our research goal is to identify new approaches to reduce worker injuries in dairies and to improve cattle flow and productivity on dairy farms. We hypothesize that stockmanship training will decrease the incidence of injuries of dairy workers and improve cattle flow on dairy farms. The objectives of our study are: 1) To prospectively describe the occurrence of injuries of Minnesota dairy farm workers, 2) Audit the current knowledge, skills and behaviors of the dairy workforce, and 3) Assess the impact of stockmanship training on worker injury frequency, stockmanship skills and cattle flow on Minnesota dairy farms.
Project Methods
Ten large dairy herds with more than 400 milking cows will be enrolled in this study as demonstration herds. These dairies would be within 120 miles of the St. Paul campus to facilitate easy access. The herds will be visited monthly over for 6 months (7 visits), which will allow for pre- and post-assessment of stockmanship training. The enrollment of herds will be staggert to counteract the effect of season (i.e.weather) on milk production.At the first herd visit, the workers will be surveyed regarding basic demographics, number of years of livestock experience, and job/stockmanship training. Workers will be asked to record any incident injuries on a brief form and submit them with a unique identifier (MMDD of their birthdate) in a locked mailbox located in the change room for easy access (Aim 2 & 3). This mailbox will be emptied at the monthly visits. Likewise, the herds will be asked to record injuries in cattle, whether the injury was related to human-animal interactions and whether they resulted in a cull or death of the animal.Furthermore, two cameras will be installed over the milking parlor and holding pen area to film the loading of fresh heifers. We will film animal and human interactions before and after stockmanship training (aim 1 & 3). To account for potential variation between milking times or days, the loading of the fresh heifer pen will be filmed on morning, midday, and evening milking on 3 different days. The cameras will be started remotely to reduce observer effect. Lastly, the number of people working on the dairy, barn set-up, distance from fresh heifer pen to parlor, flooring, width of parlor entry, open or closed sides of parlor entry, type of the milking parlor, steps of milking routine and production data will be collected. Camera 1 will be installed over the holding pen and entry to the parlor. Heifers in the fresh heifer pen will be marked with a blue stripe on their back at calving to identify them as part of the fresh heifer pen. We will record the number of animals in the pen and measure the time that it takes to fill one side of a parlor (e.g. double eight) and the total time that it takes to move the heifer pen into the milking parlor. In addition, we will count slips, switch-arounds (animal moves towards parlor entry, but turns around) and cattle vocalizations, as measure of stress (Grandin, 2010). On the stockmanship side, we will record the number of workers moving heifers into the parlor, their vocalizations (e.g. whistling), quality of touching of animals (i.e., touching, slapping, cattle prod), handling mistakes and how long it takes them to move one animal into the parlor. The collected data will be averaged. Camera 2 will be mounted over the milking parlor to show hip movement of cattle during the milking routine, indicating discomfort. We will count how often heifers 'dance' from side to side (i.e., either hip moves past predefined line), number of defecations, number of times that milking units are kicked off and kicks per animal.The stockmanship training will be completed at the 4th visit. We will use a recently developed stockmanship training videos that were developed by Drs. Paul Rapnicki and Don Hoglund (University of Minnesota) in conjunction with Merck. It will be provided to staff and workers at the enrolled dairies free of charge. The training session would be led by the researchers. Workers will have the opportunity to review and discuss training concepts. At monthly visits, the following data will be collected: electronic dairy comp 305 back up files for cow production data of the entire herd (daily and monthly milk weights), injury reports (both human & cows) and video. The collected report will be checked for completeness and workers will be reminded to fill out forms. The researcher will also be present to discuss stockmanship principles after the stockmanship training.The data gathered from the film material will be reviewed by six students. One hour of filmed material will take roughly 2 h of analysis per person. For every farm, two people will focus on the holding pen with one person recording animal behavior and the other person human-animal interactions. The third person will focus on the animal behavior in the milking parlor. Another student will help at the farm visits at month 2, 3, 5 and 6. The research team will compare parameters before and after the training intervention (Aim3).Data AnalysisData will be entered in the freeware EpiInfo and further analysis will be completed in SAS 9.3. We anticipate enrolling at least 10 workers per dairy for a minimum of 100 employees in total. Previous retrospective studies found a 40% injury risk in dairy workers (Roman-Muniz, 2006). We anticipate a higher injury risk due to the prospective nature of the study. Therefore, we will need roughly 85 people to show a reduction from an expected injury risk of 50% to 30% (period=3 months, one-sided hypothesis, α=0.05, power=0.8). Comparisons between cow parameters, which include behavior aspects and daily milk weights, and worker injury before and after stockmanship training will be done using appropriate statistical tests that account for dependency of the observations. We will predominately use the bi-variate McNemar's test for proportions and Wilcoxon signed rank test for continuous or count data.

Progress 04/10/14 to 06/30/15

Outputs
Target Audience:The data was collected to add to the existing literature regarding stockmanship on farms. The study results have been/will be used to promote stockmanship training on dairy farms as it for the first time shows the positive impact that it can have. Results and videos of this study have been shared with producers and veterinarians at field days and other occasions. Changes/Problems:There were several changes needed due to obstacles that were experienced. First, we were only able to do the study in 7 farms instead of the anticipated 10 farms, because of the poor response rate. However, this allowed us to analyze more videos per farm than originally planned, which improves the estimates gathered from this study. Second, we had to add a face-to-face anonymous survey about injuries into the second half of the study, because no injury reports were filed. Third, we also added a brief survey regarding the perception of stockmanship training for the workers as well. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?The PostDoctoral fellow and the students learned about the development of on farm surveys, writing of surveys, ethograms and analysis of video sequences. The participating dairy farm employees learned about cow behavior and a few stockmanship tricks to make their daily life easier. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Yes. Several workshops and presentations have been already given that use some of the film material from this study as well as the results. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Nothing Reported

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Cattle are handled on every dairy farm in the world. Poor cattle handling leads to stress of the animals, slow cow flow and a negative health and production impact in cattle and higher injury risk for people and animals. Therefore, the objectives were 1) to audit the current stockmanship knowledge, skills and behaviors of the dairy workforce, 2) To prospectively describe the occurrence of injuries of Minnesota dairy farm workers, and 3) To assess the impact of stockmanship training on cow behavior, productivity and cattle flow as well as worker injury frequency on Minnesota dairy farms. Six large farms ultimately allowed the installation of cameras and had over 80% of the employees agree to participate in this study. Unfortunately, little information could be obtained regarding injuries of workers as very few filled out injury report cards or responded to a face-to-face interview. However, the observations for the other two objectives of this project were very fruitful. Most employees (87%) appreciated the stockmanship training and said that they learned something new about how to move cows or general cow behavior. Most of these (90%) also said that they implemented provided stockmanship tips and that they were useful in their daily work. Furthermore, this study showed for the first time that cattle handling in the pen did translate to cow behavior in the holding pen and parlor. Of course, herds were different from the beginning and the impact of the stockmanship training varied by herd. However, across all herds, the cattle handling practices were already decent prior to stockmanship training and few forceful interactions or mistakes were identified. This will have contributed to the observation that the duration to move cattle from pen to parlor did not shorten significantly after the stockmanship training. However, fewer escape behavior of cows in the pen or holding pen were observed after the training, which ultimately was associated with less defecation in the parlor and higher milk production in some herds. Associations of different cow behavior aspects were comparable throughout milking across all herds and so the behavior data of 1,120 cows was combined for cow level observations. It was interesting to note that cows that were hesitant to go into the parlor (i.e, longer entry time) were more likely to step a lot prior to the milking routine. On the other hand, cows that were stepping a lot during the prep routine tended to be milked longer. Unfortunately, no daily milk weights were collected from the herds so that no association to milk yield could be established. As expected kicks from cows were associated with severe interactions from milkers. Furthermore, milkers would go through the whole range of interactions with difficult cows from gentle over intermediate to severe (e.g. forceful slap) to try to either calm or make the animal behave. Overall, this is the first study to quantify the impact of stockmanship training on large dairy farms in North America and to show that the impact of the quality of cattle handling in the home pen is indeed associated with cattle behavior in the holding pen and parlor and that good cattle handling can positively impact the milk production of dairy farms within a short amount of time.

Publications

  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Sorge US. Importance of stockmanship on dairy farms, Minnesota Dairy Health Conference, Bloomington MN, May 6-8, 2015.
  • Type: Other Status: Awaiting Publication Year Published: 2015 Citation: Sorge US. Importance of stockmanship on dairy farms, Morris Dairy Field day, WCROC, University of Morris, Morris, MN August 11, 2015.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Sorge US, A Stanton, L Espejo, J Bender. Importance of stockmanship on dairy farms, Annual Conference of the American Association of Bovine Practitioners, New Orleans, Sept 16-19, 2015
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Other Year Published: 2016 Citation: Sorge US, A Stanton, L Espejo, J Bender. Impact of Stockmanship Training on Large Dairy Farms. In preparation for J. Dairy Science
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Other Year Published: 2016 Citation: Stanton A, L Espejo, J Bender, US Sorge. A short communication: Cattle behavior during milking routine. In preparation for J. Dairy Sci.
  • Type: Other Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Sorge. Stockmanship Tips. TODD COUNTY ANNUAL FEEDLOT MEETING, Clarissa, MN, March 11, 2015
  • Type: Other Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Sorge US. Introduction to stockmanship. 5 Star Dairy - on farm presenation/training. Menomonie, WI, August 14,2015
  • Type: Other Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Sorge. Stockmanship Tips for Dairy Farmers. Producer Meeting for Rideau-St. Lawrence Veterinary Services, Kemptville, ON Canada, April 17, 2015
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: Sorge. Importance of Stockmanship on Dairy Farms. Annual Meeting of American Association of Bovine Practitioners. Albuquerque, NM Sept 2014


Progress 04/10/14 to 09/30/14

Outputs
Target Audience: Nothing Reported Changes/Problems: The major changes and challenges were that many herds in Minnesota and their workers were not willing to let cameras be installed on farm. Therefore we broadened our study population and included herds in Wisconsin from early June onwards. Furthermore, workers were concerned about privacy despite assurance that every data collected was confidential and also did not fill out injury report forms despite monthly reminders. One herd lost almost all workers at about the halfway point of the study and therefore the training was delayed from August to October on that herd, which will elongate the observation time until January. Multiple cameras were installed on each farm to capture the stockmanship. Due to the climate in dairy barns, the outdoor surveillance cameras (specifically selected to work in potentially damp climate) broke down regularly which rendered entire film sequences/shifts unusable. Furthermore, the lack of consent from individual workers (e.g. cow pushers) did not allow us to use film material for entire shifts despite other workers consent, because for the analysis the sequence from pen to parlor is crucial. However, at this point we have enough pre-stockmanship training video to proceed on all farms. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Some of the intially captured videos were used as teaching material (after blurring the faces and only when the consent for a video release was given) to explain stockmanship principles to participants in the study. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Nothing Reported What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? We will complete the stockmanship training on all farms. In addition, we will continue to collect film of the fresh group/stockmanship and to monitor injuries on farms. During the next period, the analysis of videos will be intensified and data entry into electronic files will occur for statistical analysis.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? During this time period, herds in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin were invited to particiate. As of June 2014, 6 dairy farms in Minnesota and Wisconsin agreed to participate in this research and to allow the installation of cameras on farm. One herd in Wisconsin did not allow the installation of cameras, but participated in this research. The cameras were installed after the majority of workers in the dairy farms signaled their willingness to participate in the study. Video was recorded and some injury reports were also filed. As of the end of September, 4 of the 7 herds had completed the stockmanship training. One of the herds had lost most of its workers just prior to the stockmanship training and so the training of new employees was delayed to gather more pre-training video. The remaining 3 herds were scheduled for training during the first half of October 2014. The students also started to analyze some of the captured video of the "fresh" pens milking routine, which included the time they were brought up from the parlor. At the monthly herd visit, the workers were reminded to please fill out injury report cards, if injuries occurred.

Publications