Enhancing dairy cow welfare and sustainable milk production through grazing practices

Grazing has a positive impact on the health and welfare of dairy cows.

Grazing allows the animals to express natural behavior, decreases the occurrence of lameness, mastitis, hock lesions, and decreases mortality.

Grazing and pastures contribute to increased biodiversity, increased carbon sequestration in soil, and decreased use of pesticides and non-renewable energy sources.

Despite these benefits, the statutory grazing requirement has been questioned by Swedish dairy farmers since maintaining pastures is laborious and costly.

In addition, a common problem at dairy farms in Sweden is that milk production and concentrations of fat and protein in milk decrease during the grazing period, which may decrease farm profitability.

We aim to investigate how moving of Nordic high-yielding dairy cows from indoor feeding to part-time grazing in spring affects the cows’ nutritional and metabolic balance, milk production, and welfare.

For this purpose, we will conduct a grazing experiment in spring 2024 at the research barn at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, in Umeå.

The second aim of the project is to use the information provided by the grazing study in order to provide farmers with advice on how to adjust the indoor diets so that milk production can be maintained during the grazing period.

We believe that this will provide farmers with motivation to let their animals graze and enhance dairy cow welfare through increased grazing in Sweden and other Nordic countries.