Cow husbandry has been all about milk yield for a long time, but things are changing. “Today, the focus is much more on the welfare and health of the animals. However, there is still a lot that is unknown,” says Christian Looft.

The 59-year-old has been doing research on and with farm animals for a long time, and for the past six years he has also been teaching as a professor of animal breeding and husbandry at the University of Applied Sciences in Neubrandenburg. He knows about the blind spots in his discipline. In 2019, he has therefore launched a ground-breaking research project called JerRi that aims to better understand Jersey cattle: What behaviour is characteristic of the breed and what could an animal-friendly husbandry system look like?

“So far, Jerseys have hardly played a role as a dairy breed in Germany. Yet their milk contains more ingredients,” says Looft, explaining that it has more fat and protein than, for example, the milk of the common black and white Holsteins. For farmers, this is an important economic argument because they can sell the milk more expensively.

And there is another advantage: “Jerseys are small and light, they have to haul less body mass and therefore require less energy. Keeping them saves resources, compared to other breeds,” says Looft. The low weight, i.e., the low amount of meat, is the reason why German Holsteins prevailed in the past, he says: “With the Holsteins, more attention has been paid to balance in breeding. They give milk, but also produce meat that can be sold."

However, if ecological and sustainable aspects in animal husbandry become more important in the future – and according to Looft, this is to be expected – Jerseys could be found much more frequently in stables and on pastures around Germany.

Research on three farms in Germany and Denmark

Therefore, it is necessary to clarify as soon as possible how this certain breed of cattle can be kept in an animal-friendly way. The JerRi project is investigating two of the aspects: Health and nutrition. The team recently published its first paper, and others are currently going through the peer-review process, in which they are reviewed by colleagues from the specialist community.

JerRi is based on a large data basis: In three test farms, Jerseys were observed for several months. The most progressive of these farms is located in Foulum in Denmark. There, Sandra Gündel studied the feeding behaviour of the animals.

The 28-year-old researcher has been involved with animals her entire academic career: “I wrote my bachelor’s thesis on milking systems, and my master’s thesis on the population genomics of bumblebees. This project was the next logical step for me,” she says. As she wanted to work abroad anyway, she took on the project part in Foulum – at the Danish Cattle Research Centre (DKC), a high-tech experimental barn at Aarhus University, where data on feeding behaviour is collected automatically.

The animals that Gündel studied at the DKC live year-round in loose housing without access to pasture, and they all wear sensors on their collars. “The sensors identify them when they step up to one of the weighing troughs,” she explains. The troughs record the weight of their contents before and after each visit of an animal, as well as the time spent eating.

The older the animals, the greater the differences between Jerseys and Holstein

Gündel collected many gigabytes of data at the experimental barn: Tables in which the feeding behaviour of a total of 334 animals was recorded over a period of several weeks. To make a comparison, she looked at the behaviour of 116 Jerseys and 218 Holsteins.

If you take a random data series from this pool, you get information such as this: “Animal number 7081 visited the feeding place an average of 26.7 times a day,” says Gündel. “It ate an average of 78.7 grams per minute and was busy feeding for a total of 85.9 minutes per day. That's not a good average for a Jersey, though,” she explains, adding, “It could indicate disease.” We will come back to that later.

Actually, Jerseys visit the trough much more often. They paid an average of 52 visits, so-called “feeder visits”, to the troughs in Gündel's survey every day – almost twice as many as Holsteins. The difference increases with age. But: Jerseys eat for a much shorter time during each visit.

“Jerseys are on the move all day, wandering between lying, drinking, and feeding areas and thus using the entire stable area,” says Gündel. “There can be many reasons for this: It might be a breed effect, so that the animals generally move more than other breeds. Or they need more space or are underchallenged. But that is just an interpretation of the data.”

Behavioural problems: Biting poles, licking, and water splashing

However, the results of the second part of the JerRi project somewhat support this interpretation: Susanne Demba conducted behavioural observations on two test farms in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania and Brandenburg. Demba, who has a PhD in agricultural sciences, wanted to find out how Jerseys behave when they have access to a pasture.

Previous studies have shown that the breed often develops behavioural problems in the stable: “These can be tongue rolling, some lick each other or lick objects, they splash in drinking water or bite the rods of stable equipment. I've seen all that too,” says Demba, “fortunately nothing worse.” In other studies, Jerseys have even been observed banging their heads against a wall or behaving aggressively towards other cows.

Out of hundreds of animals on the two conventional farms, Demba identified 21 cows with behavioural problems. She observed them in winter, when the herds were kept indoors, and in summer, when they lived on pasture. Each animal was monitored for 15 minutes at a time, with time measurement starting from the first conspicuous behaviour. She noted what behaviour the cows showed during this time period and if they took breaks in between. In total, she carried out these observations eight times, on four days in winter and four days in early summer.

Big difference between pasture and stable husbandry

“According to my observations, behavioural problems have to do with frustration and boredom. They occur when the animals don't get to their food, or the drinking trough is occupied, or their favourite place. Then I have seen tongue rolling and pole biting,” says the 37-year-old researcher. However, in summer, the animals showed much less behavioural problems and for a much shorter time. On one farm, she could no longer observe any conspicuous behaviour in summer in eight out of ten animals.

“I didn't expect the difference to be so huge: In summer, behavioural problems went down by 46 per cent,” says Demba, who describes herself as a very cow-affine person. “It wouldn’t disappear completely, though, because the animals have learned the patterns. Like nail biting in humans.” Behavioural problems often start in calf age, she says. The cows learn from an early age to relieve stress in this way.

Her findings suggest that pasturing is beneficial for keeping Jerseys. “But it is not feasible for every farm,” says Susanne Demba. “I think a lot could be compensated for if the animals always have access to fresh feed in the barn. I have never seen so much feed frustration or rank fights as with the Jerseys. They are temperamental!” In the barn, she therefore recommends keeping Jerseys in small groups so that even lower-ranking animals can always get to the food.

Side aspect: Health data could enable prognoses

The JerRi research project will be finished by the end of 2022, and until then, the researchers are working on further publications. In the data from Denmark, they discovered a promising side aspect.

Christian Looft explains: “We analysed feeding behaviour and movement patterns in Foulum. But in the experimental barn we also noted when the cows were sick.” This was important in order to account for missing data later on, because cows that were undergoing medical treatment were not in the barn on these days. “We noticed that lameness, mostly due to claw diseases, became visible in our movement data long before it was seen in the barn. The animals moved less, even days beforehand,” says Looft.

The professor hopes that some kind of early warning system could emerge from this observation: When an animal's activity decreases, a computer could report the “alarm cow” and a veterinarian could start treatment early on, keeping that the acute phases to a minimum.

How much do we value animal welfare?

“Twenty years ago, no one talked about animal welfare,” says Looft, “but today we've moved on and are increasingly focusing on the ecological aspect of agriculture.” However, he doubts that the many findings from the JerRi project will be translated into reality in the near future. “Nowadays, very few farms have enough land for pasturing.”

This is due to huge herds that enable cost regression: Fewer employees per animal, automated milking systems, cheap production. In Looft's eyes, a fundamental change to the established system can only be achieved through customer demand: “What is society willing to pay for animal welfare?” In surveys, people were always voting for organic food, pasturing, and animal welfare, he says. The real decisions, however, are made in the supermarket: “Do you chose the expensive organic products over the cheaper conventional ones?”