The team of Dr. Jen Walker, Dr. Gerard Cramer and Jamie Sullivan are using their expertise and experience to educate, train and promote the principles of hoof care, and proper functional and therapeutic trimming techniques for improved animal welfare on farms through the Kinder Hoof Care Academy Trimmer Training.

I work with farms across the country troubleshooting for potential contributors to lameness prevalence in their herd. Cattle lameness is a challenge that every farm will one day experience. It is better to prevent it through procedures such as scheduled maintenance, hoof trimming and overall herd management practices.

Producers express concerns that restraining cows during hoof trimming might induce both short- and long-term effects on production and behavior.

All lactating cows should be locomotion scored on a weekly basis. This is a great start in identifying cows that could benefit from a trip through the trimming chute. In addition to locomotion scoring, what other techniques can we implement on a daily basis that could help us catch the cows with an early onset of lameness? 

Due to the significant negative impact on cow welfare and the complexity of the issue, multiple farm advisers are often involved in lameness management.

The U.S. has high-quality data pipelines for the flow of production, fertility and health records, but there is not currently a pipeline of hoof health information. As an essential first step, CDCB, the University of Minnesota (UMN) and several collaborators are working to consistently identify and record hoof health traits.

About 12 people meet at Mountain View Dairy in Delta, Utah, twice a year. Their goal? To trim the hooves of the farm’s 3,000 dairy cows. The hoof trimmers have participated in this bi-annual working vacation since 2003, and they have seen many herd health benefits.