What does lameness actually cost a dairy herd?

Lameness is the third most costly health problem in a dairy herd, after mastitis and fertility. It still gets noticed later than either of those, because it does not show up in the bulk tank and it does not show up in the insemination figures.

This article draws on two sources: Mariëlle Bruijnis's doctoral thesis from Wageningen University, which modelled both cost and welfare impact across a whole herd, and the figures published by Conneely and Ryan in the Veterinary Ireland Journal, which price an individual case. Full references at the end.

Before the numbers: these figures come from the Netherlands and Ireland, from different years, under different milk, labour and treatment prices. They are not local costs and should not be converted directly. Treat them as an order of magnitude, and above all as a structure — the structure travels better than the amounts.

Two numbers that must not be confused

There are two correct answers to "what does lameness cost", and they measure entirely different things.

Cost per cow in the herd, per year. Bruijnis's model, for a default 65-cow farm, produced €3,474 a year — €53 for every cow in the herd, not per affected cow. The range ran from €2,282 to €4,965.

Cost of an individual case. The Irish figures price a specific clinical animal, and those amounts are an order of magnitude higher.

Both numbers are true. The first says what the herd quietly loses across a year. The second says what this one cow, the one you have just pulled out of the group, is costing you.

What the cost is made of

This is the important part, and usually the surprise. In Bruijnis's model the costs broke down like this:

Treatment, visits and trimming — everything that appears on an invoice — are the smallest part of the bill. More than three quarters of the cost is made of things nobody invoices: milk that never came, a cow culled too early, and days added to the calving interval.

Which is why the instinct that "trimming is expensive" runs opposite to the arithmetic. The trimmer's invoice is visible. Forty-four per cent of the cost, in the form of milk that did not arrive, is not.

The expensive part is the part nobody sees

Subclinical disorders — the ones a farmer does not register as disease — account for 32% of all costs and about half of the total welfare burden (54% in the thesis model, 50% in the published paper).

An individual clinical case costs on average €67, a subclinical one €13. That gap looks reassuring, right up until you look at the scale.

In the model, more than half of the cows had subclinical sole haemorrhage, and had it for an average of four months a year. For contrast: interdigital phlegmon affected around 6% of cows annually, caused very severe pain, and lasted roughly a week.

That is the whole arithmetic of the problem. A dozen euros times four months times half the herd beats several hundred euros times a few per cent of the herd.

There is one more thing. Subclinical disorders frequently occur bilaterally. The cow then has no sound limb to shift her weight onto, so she does not limp in the way that catches your eye. She does not look ill — which is exactly why she never makes the list.

How much milk leaks away

The Irish figures tie the loss directly to mobility score, in a herd averaging 6,000 litres over 305 days:

• Score 2 — annual yield down 1.6%
• Score 3 — down 6%

Across studies more generally, the loss falls between 270 and 574 kg per lactation.

Note score 2. That is a cow who is not yet "lame" in the everyday sense — and she is already giving up milk.

Fertility

Pain changes behaviour, and changed oestrus behaviour means poorer heat detection:

• Score 2 — calving interval longer by 3.5 days
• Score 3 — longer by 6 days

More broadly in the literature: seven days longer to first service, thirty days added to days open, and a 20% reduction in conception rate.

Culling

This is where the numbers land hardest. Compared with a cow walking normally:

In a Spanish study, a heifer with a sole ulcer or white line disease in her first lactation had her productive life shortened by 71 days.

Culling is 22% of the cost in the Dutch model. The figures above are where that 22% comes from.

Putting it on a herd

The Irish calculation for a 100-cow herd, with 10% incidence of digital dermatitis, 10% white line disease, 10% sole ulcer and 8% footrot, comes to €8,750 a year.

That is the bill for four disorders at prevalences many farmers would consider tolerable.

Where do you actually stand

To know whether you have a problem you need a benchmark. The Irish data provides one:

• Average lameness prevalence in Irish dairy herds: 9%
• Best-performing farms: under 5%
• The threshold above which action is needed: over 10%
• Spread by housing system: from 3.8% on year-round pasture to 63% fully housed

That last range says more than the average does. The difference between 3.8% and 63% is not genetics and it is not luck — it is what the cow stands and lies on.

What actually pays for itself

Bruijnis also modelled interventions available on a cubicle-housed farm. The result:

• Improving the lying surface — cost-effective
• Additional foot trimming — cost-effective
• Reducing stocking density — breaks even

Improved lying surface and reduced stocking density also carried a relatively high welfare benefit.

So two measures pay for themselves, and one of them is simply trimming more often.

Why this cost is so widely underestimated

The thesis gives the question its own attention, and offers three reasons.

Habit. Farmers come to treat a certain level of lameness as part of the system rather than as a problem to be solved.

A cow is a prey animal. She may show little behavioural response even to a significant degree of pain. She does not advertise it the way we expect her to.

Assessment is inconsistent. Diagnoses differ considerably between observers, and particularly between a farmer and a professional assessor. What is not measured consistently cannot be tracked over time.

What this means in practice

Every figure above shares one property: you will not see any of it unless you measure. Lost milk spreads itself across the whole herd. A longer calving interval shows up in the annual summary with no cause attached. A cow culled too early leaves with "feet" written next to her number.

The minimum that turns this into numbers you can manage:

• Mobility scoring at every visit, not only on the obviously lame — because the cost starts at score 2
• Herd prevalence over time, so you know whether you are closer to 5% or to 10%
• A split by disorder, because a sole ulcer and dermatitis are different money and different actions
• Recurrence in the same animals, because that is what drives culling
• Subclinical lesions, recorded even when the cow is not lame

Cownt records mobility scores on the AHDB or Sprecher scale, keeps diagnoses in ICAR codes, and computes the prevalence of each disorder across the herd. The portal shows the lameness trend over 30 days, 90 days and 12 months, along with the list of cows coming back with the same problem — free of charge for the farmer too, once the trimmer shares the data.

Because the difference between "I think we have a few lame ones" and "prevalence fell from 14% to 8% over three visits" is the difference between an impression and a decision.

References

• Bruijnis, M. R. N. (2012). Foot disorders in dairy cattle — A socio-economic approach to improve dairy cow welfare. PhD thesis, Wageningen University, The Netherlands. ISBN 978-94-6173-392-4.
• Conneely, M., & Ryan, E. (2024). The cost of lameness in Irish dairy herds. Veterinary Ireland Journal.
• ICAR Claw Health Atlas — the international standard for classifying claw disorders.