Dairy cattle replacement under changing agri-environmental policies

Summary

Agri-environmental policies like the phosphate rights system have had a major impact on the operations of Dutch dairy farms. One of the measures farmers use to adjust their farming strategies is replacement of dairy cows. Replacement of dairy cows can be defined as the removal of producing cow (culling) and replacing it by a suitable heifer (young cow) better than the culled cow. In the past, complex models have been developed to study and support replacement decisions and heifer rearing strategies. However, farmers tend to make replacement decisions relying on their intuition and simple rules of thumb. Given that future farm goals must include further reductions in environmental burden, the replacement strategies of dairy farmers needed to be revisited.
Thus, this thesis aimed to investigate the drivers behind dairy cattle replacement and heifer rearing and use these insights to understand the consequences of changes in policy on cattle replacement.