DAIRY CHAMPION
A case for lameness By Gerald Piddock
A Taranaki vet has spent his career working on farms to solve the cow lameness puzzle but the puzzle is what makes it engrossing.
W
atching Neil Chesterton investigating lameness on a dairy farm is akin to watching the American cop TV show CSI. The semi-retired Taranaki-based veterinarian analyses lameness with the same zeal and meticulousness that his fictional counterparts on the small screen do when forensically examining a homicide crime scene. There’s no blood, weapons, shootouts or montages of actors in laboratories staring through microscopes, solving the case. Instead, there are poor track surfaces, dodgy slopes, poor stockmanship and badly designed yards that provide the evidence he needs to find the source of the problem. For Chesterton, lame cows are the victim and the farm’s race, yards and other infrastructure are his crime scene. Sometimes it’s not immediately apparent. It becomes a puzzle he is determined to solve, requiring multiple trips to a farm to find the answer. But solving this puzzle was what made it so engrossing, Chesterton says. “It is like being a detective. It’s
looking at the problem and getting the information,” he says. “It’s obsessive and when I find out, I often find something I never thought of before and it probably applies to another farm.” But once the source is found and the risks to the cows are identified, a solution can be presented to the farmer. The case then gets added to the knowledge he has accumulated over the nearly 50 years he has been in the veterinary industry and observing the risk factors of lameness in the industry. Passing on that knowledge to farmers is the most rewarding thing he can do, he says. He has become a familiar face in the dairy industry as the go-to expert on the causes and prevention of lameness in cows. He semi-retired four years ago and apart from training seminars for recent graduate vets and for farmers, he dedicates his free time to researching lameness on dairy farms around NZ. Lameness can become an expensive exercise for farmers if left unchecked. According to DairyNZ, the financial impact of lameness is estimated at $250
Neil Chesterton is a Taranaki veterinarian and New Zealand’s foremost expert on lameness in herds.
per lameness case. For an average dairy farm this equates to almost $15,000 a year (average herd size 419 cows, average incidence 14%).
Poor track surfaces, dodgy slopes, poor stockmanship and badly designed yards can often be the cause of lameness.
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DAIRY FARMER
June 2022
