Benchmarking To Improve Animal Welfare: A Case Study With Dairy Cows
There are a variety of ways of measuring the welfare of farmed animals, whether through observation, biological measurements of hormones like cortisol, or a whole range of other options. However, as with all types of observation, benchmarking – setting a standard or point of reference against which future measurements can be compared – is crucial. When it comes to assessments about animal welfare and decisions on how to implement improvements, benchmarks could help farmers to know not only how their farm is performing against its own standards, but against other farms as well.
In this particular study from Canada, researchers wanted to “describe how benchmarking motivates farmers to make changes in calf management.” They used a qualitative, interview-based approach to better understand how farmers thought about calves and making changes in their management. The study involved 18 farms all grouped within a particular region, and the researchers interviewed those responsible for calf-care, including farm owners, herd managers, and calf managers. During the study, each farm received two reports on welfare, 10 weeks apart.
In their subsequent interviews, the authors determined that the process did indeed make a difference, finding that “benchmarking process provided farmers with information on how their calves were doing and on how they compared with other farms, challenging them to rethink their calf management.” Explaining further, they note that the farmers “seeing their own data in relation to other farms was linked to farmers’ feelings of confidence in knowing how well they were managing their calves.” They also noted that farmers tended to think about data from benchmarking mostly positively before and after receiving the reports.
However, at the risk of portraying everything in a positive light, the researchers give two caveats that are worth mentioning. The first is social desirability bias, or the idea that farmers may be giving positive answers to feel and seem like good people, while the reality is less positive. The second caveat is that, though the results of this study were positive and the farmers were quite interested in the benchmarking process, this smaller group cannot represent all dairy farmers. For future research, the authors recommend mixing qualitative and quantitative methods to make stronger claims that can be better verified.
For animal advocates, the study is potentially very positive, as it indicates that farmers who know better will strive to do better. However, even without such a positive spin on it, at the very least the study shows that access to data has direct value for farmers, and even further, “benchmarking helps shift social norms around calf management and tap into social networks to identify ways of improving calf care.”