Farmers Weekly Awards 2023: Livestock Adviser of the Year

Sara Pedersen of Farm Dynamics, Vale of Glamorgan, is the 2023 Farmers Weekly Livestock Adviser of the Year.

Veterinary consultant Sara Pedersen has assisted one dairy farmer in South Wales to cut lameness in his milking herd and win a valuable milking contract, which adds an extra £8,000 to his monthly milk cheque.

Sara introduced mobility scoring every two weeks for Russell Morgan’s 230-strong Holstein milking herd, and over a three-year period cut lameness from 45% of his cows down to just 8%.

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This dramatic fall in lameness is estimated to have saved him £60,000 over the three years, and led to Russell signing up for a milk supply contract with retailer Marks & Spencer.

“It’s no good farmers getting their grazing right and their parlours right if the cows don’t want to walk,” Sara says.

Causes of lameness

The strict scoring regime led to regular visits from a skilled foot trimmer, which helped cut down on the three main causes of lameness – bacterial digital dermatitis, sole ulcers and white line problems from poor cow movement. Improving cow comfort and ventilation also helped.

“Some 30% of the cows had sole ulcers when we started, and now there was only one case last year,” she says.

Sara focused on lameness after leaving vet school having never trimmed a cow’s foot. She wanted to highlight this as a key issue in dairy herds, along with nutrition and fertility, so she set up her own company, Farm Dynamics, in 2014 from her base in Cowbridge.

This interest led her to a PhD at Nottingham University, which she is about to complete, involving the largest study in the world on the need for foot treatment for young heifers before they enter the milking herd.

She is also helping to train other vets in foot care and lameness.

She says the benefits of improved cow mobility extend to helping the environment – more efficient milk production and lower culling rates can help reduce overall carbon emissions by producing more milk from the same number of cows.

Herd expansion

With a healthier, more mobile herd, Russell is now looking to increase his Holstein herd from 230 milking cows towards 300-350, and with lameness under control it will allow him to put more of a focus on genetics to improve productivity.

“We would not have got the M&S contract in February 2001 without Sara’s help, while she has also been helping with ideas about housing and general herd health,” he says.

Sara started working at the farm in 2019, and implemented the three-year strategy the following year.

The farm’s focus on nutrition, fertility and finally lameness has seen the average annual milk yield from the robot-milked herd rise by 3,500 litres over the three years from 8,000 litres to 11,500 litres, although a lot of that improvement came from better nutrition.

The farm has been using robots for five years and has joined the 38 farms that supply milk to M&S, and so Russell allows the cows to graze outside for a set number of days a year to meet the retailer’s requirements.