Perspectives of Western Canadian dairy farmers on providing outdoor access for dairy cows
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dairy cows are highly motivated to access pasture, especially at night in summer. When pasture is not available, dairy cows show a partial preference for alternative types of outdoor access, spending half the night outside in summer on an outdoor sand or wood chip pack. However, many dairy farms do not provide cows outside access. To better understand reasons why dairy farmers choose to provide or not provide outdoor access, we studied the perspectives of dairy farmers located in the 4 Western Canadian provinces: British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Data were collected via (1) 11 focus group discussions with a total of 50 Western Canadian dairy farmers, and (2) semi-structured individual interviews with 6 dairy farmers of Hutterite colonies. Transcripts were analyzed using template analysis. Reasons to not provide outdoor access fell into 5 main themes: (1) adverse climate conditions, (2) negative implications of outdoor access for cow welfare including concerns about udder health, (3) concerns regarding decreases in profitability, (4) farm infrastructure not set up for outdoor access, and (5) higher ability to manage animals kept indoors. Reasons to provide outdoor access fell into the 5 main themes: (1) local climate conditions conducive for outdoor access, (2) beneficial effects of outdoor access on cow welfare including lower lameness prevalence, (3) increased profitability due to a premium milk price provided to farmers that allow pasture access to their cows, (4) farm infrastructure that is set up for outdoor access, and (5) easier management of animals outdoors. We conclude that the decision to provide outdoor access depends on how farmers weigh these factors given the constraints on their farm, as well as their personal beliefs and values.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".