Farmed Animals

Dairy Welfare Metrics and Benchmarking

Standardised welfare metrics for dairy herds enable benchmarking, accountability, and targeted improvement.

Key Facts

Welfare Quality protocols provide standardised assessment for dairy cattle across multiple measures
Lameness, mastitis, body condition score, and mortality are key outcome-based dairy welfare metrics
On-farm welfare assessment takes 3-5 hours for an average herd and requires trained assessors
Welfare benchmarking between farms enables performance comparison and targeted improvement
National dairy welfare monitoring programmes exist in several EU countries

Welfare Considerations

Standardised dairy welfare metrics allow the identification of the highest-welfare and lowest-welfare farms, enabling targeted support for improvement and accountability through certification. Outcome-based measures that assess actual animal states are more reliable indicators than input measures such as facilities and management procedures.

What You Can Do

Support mandatory welfare outcome reporting in dairy industry standards
Choose dairy products from schemes with transparent welfare metric reporting
Advocate for national dairy welfare monitoring programmes
Support research into cost-effective on-farm welfare assessment tools
Encourage farmer engagement with welfare benchmarking as a continuous improvement tool