Potential economic returns associated with weekly body condition scoring

Abstract Text:

The objective of this study was to estimate the potential economic returns from weekly recordings of body condition score (BCS) using a farm-level decision support tool.   The feasibility of weekly BCS increases with the availability of automated BCS systems.  To fully benefit from frequent BCS, the information must be used to make BCS-related cow, group, or herd management changes. These decisions may alter BCS distributions which can positively impact disease incidence, reproduction parameters, and feed efficiency. User inputs for the decision support tool included farm-specific herd demographics, financial data, disease incidences, and herd BCS distribution at calving. Differences between the current and goal BCS distributions were used to evaluate the economic returns from a potential improvement. The reported current disease incidences of metritis, milk fever, and ketosis were compared with the newly predicted disease incidences estimated from published odds ratios for effects of BCS on the disease occurrence. Reproductive improvements were evaluated from a change in days open estimated from odd ratios describing BCS effects on conception rate. The lactation BCS curve was estimated using average herd BCS at calving and a 6^th order polynomial regression equation.  The average herd BCS before and after implementing regular scoring were used to compare differences in net energy costs across each lactation to compare the effects of BCS on feed efficiency. In an example scenario, input assumptions were sourced from 2015 DairyMetrics (DRMS, Raleigh, NC), USDA National Agriculture Statistics Service, and peer-reviewed literature. The inputs for current and herd BCS distributions are shown in Table 1. The increased revenue from improvements in disease incidence, reproduction, and feed efficiency estimated from this investment were $1,961.95 per year for a herd size of 183 cows. When the herd size was increased to 500 cows, with all other inputs held constant, financial improvements resulted in $3,692.12. Results from improvements in BCS are highly dependent on herd size, prior herd BCS, disease occurrence, and reproduction. This model can be used as a decision support tool to estimate farm-specific economic returns from improving BCS, potentially resulting from an investment in an automated BCS technology.

Keywords: body condition score, economics