Using guidelines from Animal Health Ireland and Teagasc, Bord Bia has developed a number of animal health and welfare modules to support the highest standards on Irish farms.

From July 10, the modules will be made available to members of the sustainable beef, lamb and dairy assurance schemes.

Five animal welfare modules are currently being developed: An introductory module, a calf welfare module, and specific modules for sheep, dairy, and beef.

In this article we look at the sheep, dairy and beef animal health and welfare modules.

The sheep module reinforces and promotes current best practices for sheep health and welfare including lamb and lambing management, disease prevention and breeding decisions.

The module covers:

The importance of mineral supplementation and scanning pre-lambing.;
Best-practice management strategies for better health and welfare during lambing and post-lambing.;
Breeding decisions that provide better health outcomes for your sheep and a more productive enterprise for you;
Improving the health of your flock by using Body Condition Scoring (BCS), a clean policy management system and steps to prevent lameness.;
The importance of an animal health programme in the prevention of disease and anthelminthic resistance.​

This module reinforces and promotes current best practices for dairy cow health and welfare including drying-off, calving, milk recording, BCS, disease prevention and breeding decisions. It will take 30 minutes to complete.

The module covers:

The impacts of drying-off and housing;
The benefits of milk recording;
Measures to control and treat mastitis and Somatic Cell Count (SCC);
The importance of using BCS to meet cyclical targets;
How to identify, treat and proactively prevent lameness;
Optimisation of breeding decisions with dairy tools, such as Economic Breeding Index (EBI), Dairy Breeding Index (DBI) and sexed semen.

The beef module is designed for suckler beef farmers and takes 30 minutes to complete. The module explores best practice in animal health and welfare from pre- to post-calving with specific attention on handling practices, physical health and breeding decisions.

Four main topics are covered:

In this topic, you will learn about best practices of hygiene, nutrition, pain and stress management and weaning.

In this topic, you will learn steps to support herd health, including the importance of BCS and disease management.

In this topic, you will learn about best housing and handling practices. Safe handling requires a safe environment that considers feed space, floor space, water and ventilation.

In this topic, you will learn about breeding management and indices that may influence breeding decisions.

Join the thousands of other farmers who have registered for the Farm Sustainability Learning Hub.

Visit farm.bordbia.ie to enroll in the Farm Sustainability Learning Hub.

You will be asked to enter your herd number and the pin number you received at your last audit. If you do not know this, there is a ‘forgot pin’ option that will text the pin to your mobile phone.

Click here to view the rest of the articles in the series.