Diary farming, as a sub-discipline of agriculture has gained global significance. It has become one of the important economic activities in many countries around the world. This book on dairy farming and management discusses in detail various practices and modern techniques such as animal physiology, feed management, animal morphology, etc. This book provides significant information of this discipline to help develop a good understanding of dairy farming and animal welfare. Comprising state-of-the-art inputs by acclaimed experts of this field, this book targets students and professionals. This book aims to serve as a resouce guide and contribute to the growth of the discipline.

According to the European legislation (Regulation EC No 853/2004), the food business operators collecting raw milk intended for the production of milk and dairy products must ensure compliance with certain health requirements for the animals. The animals must not show any symptoms of infectious diseases transmittable to humans, or signs of diseases of the udder or the genital tract that could contaminate milk. Furthermore, they must belong to a holding free or officially free of tuberculosis and brucellosis, and no unauthorized substances or authorized drugs must have been administered without respect to the withdrawal period. Dairy Farming: Operations Management, Animal Welfare and Milk Production presents a study with the goal of evaluating the compliance with the mentioned criteria in milk samples collected from 100 different dairy farms located in Central Italy. Additionally, under European milk quotas, dairy farms in Europe were limited in the amount of milk they could produce. While quotas were gradually increased over the past four decades, European milking quotas were completely abolished in April 2015 to help meet an expected 20% increase in the global consumption of milk and dairy products by 2050. With this, European dairy farmers can freely expand milk production based upon expected milk prices controlled by open market supply and demand. The authors present a review focused on milk production forecasting models and data variation from a past and future perspective. A comprehensive review of model applications and comparisons from studies over the past two decades is carried out, and both classical and modern methods are reviewed analysed. The concluding review focuses on scientific LCA studies conducted on a variety of different milk production systems, including the treatment of milk co-products, different allocation methods, the assessment of environmental impacts caused by fertilizers and agrochemicals in feed grain production and in the different stages of milk production. However, the methodology requires a higher degree of standardization, especially for the analysis of complex agricultural and livestock systems and their various forms and characteristics.

The aim of this manual is to improve the welfare of dairy cattle in tropical developing countries, and by doing so, optimise cow and herd performance. It gives the stockmen and farmers directly concerned with the cattle a better understanding of animal behaviour and the ways cattle communicate their comfort or distress. The book discusses normal cattle behaviour and shows how domestication and breeding can affect behaviour to achieve high levels of production of milk, live weight gain and fertility. Animal welfare is important for producers because it can affect the health, production and contentment of cows. Animal welfare practices which adversely affect cow and herd performance on tropical small holder dairy farms are identified. Advice is then given to change the animal's environment or modify a handler's technique to ensure cattle have the degree of comfort needed to achieve more profitable and sustainable systems of livestock farming. Cow Talk will be a beneficial resource for farmers who want to improve animal welfare, farm advisers who can assist farmers to improve their welfare practices, educators who develop training programs for farmers and dairy advisers, and other stakeholders in tropical dairy production such as local agribusiness, policy makers and research scientists.

This book covers all aspects of research into the welfare of dairy, veal and beef cattle, covering behavior, nutrition and feeding, housing and management, stockmanship, and stress physiology, as well as transport and slaughter. It also offers a detailed and critical analysis of the main indicators of animal welfare and covers the main threats to animal welfare in modern cattle production systems.

This book explores the importance of good nutrition in ensuring an adequate standard of welfare for farm animals. It is often not realized that farm animals can suffer when they are fed unsuitable diets, which may be because these diets are more economic or the farmer does not know how to rectify poor nutrition. This book reveals how to recognize and deal with feeding problems in farm animals, when the animal’s behaviour is indicating a deficiency, through oral stereotypies for example. Feeding livestock in emergency situations can present special challenges, and the availability of clean and potable water, one of the essential components of life, can also be an unrecognized problem for many farm animals. Feeding farm animals effectively is rarely recognized for the major welfare issue that it is. We may assume that animals in intensive husbandry conditions have adequate feed, yet it is often too concentrated and designed primarily to immediately maximize production from the animals, in the form of growth, milk yield or reproduction. In extensive rangeland conditions adequate feed supply also cannot be assured, potentially leading to undernutrition with serious consequences for the health and even survival of livestock. This book will provide a much-needed review of the relationships between nutrition and the welfare of farm animals.

This open access book provides both a broad perspective and a focused examination of cow care as a subject of widespread ethical concern in India, and increasingly in other parts of the world. In the face of what has persisted as a highly charged political issue over cow protection in India, intellectual space must be made to bring the wealth of Indian traditional ethical discourse to bear on the realities of current human-animal relationships, particularly those of humans with cows. Dharma, yoga, and bhakti paradigms serve as starting points for bringing Hindu—particularly Vaishnava Hindu—animal ethics into conversation with contemporary Western animal ethics. The author argues that a culture of bhakti—the inclusive, empathetic practice of spirituality centered in Krishna as the beloved cowherd of Vraja—can complement recently developed ethics-of-care thinking to create a solid basis for sustaining all kinds of cow care communities.