These changes include:

• Tail Scoring – incidence of broken tails, with records made against the individual animal’s identification, establish root cause and undertake corrective actions if there is an issue.

• Non Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug (NSAID) use – use of pain relief for painful conditions.

• Total Antibiotic use – all antibiotic use must be recorded and in a form that enables benchmarking. 

• Mastitis – numbers (all clinical cases and dry cow cases) and treatments. There must be culture of mastitis cases undertaken (at least annually) to ensure effective and appropriate antibiotic use.   

• Body Condition Scoring – milking herd BCS four times per season PLUS a root cause analysis and actions if low BCS (as a % of the herd, or on an individual animal level).

• Lameness – all cases of lameness must be recorded, including non-treated cases. The lameness score and any lesion must be recorded. Lameness scoring is a necessity to differentiate cows’ treatment and management.  

• Reproductive Performance Targets – 3-week Submission Rate, 6 week in-calf rate/not in-calf rate and disease control e.g. Neospora.

• Cow Mortality Rate – all cow deaths including dry cows and all calf deaths must be recorded.

This may seem daunting, but there is a way to make it easier and most importantly USEFUL!

The information is benchmarked against farms throughout New Zealand to provide a clear understanding of areas where optimisation of farm productivity could be obtained.

As well as ticking all the boxes for LWP, it allows us to have more meaningful discussions and easily identify groups of cows where management changes will benefit productivty.

If you have any further questions on Welfarm and/or LWP requirements, please speak to one of our vets.