How dairy heifers are reared before their first calving determines their long-term health, welfare, and productive life. Welfare investment in early life delivers returns throughout the animal's productive career.
Dairy heifer rearing is an investment in lifetime welfare outcomes. The conditions in which heifers develop — their nutrition, social environment, human relationships, and health management — create the physical and psychological foundation for their productive lives. Heifers reared in barren, isolated, nutritionally compromised conditions enter their productive lives with suppressed immune function, poor social skills, and greater fearfulness that compromise both welfare and productivity across the entire subsequent period. Welfare-positive rearing — social housing, optimal nutrition, positive human contact, and proactive health management — simultaneously improves welfare and reduces the lifetime costs of disease and reproductive failure that disproportionately affect poorly reared first-lactation cows.