Animal welfare
What good care looks like, in detail
Welfare is not a badge you buy once. It is bedding raked twice a day, a cow treated the morning she goes lame, and a calf that gets four litres of good colostrum before anyone sits down to breakfast. Here is what we hold ourselves to and how we check it.
Six commitments, written down so you can hold us to them
Each of these applies on all eleven farms. Where a farm cannot meet one — peat ground too wet to turn out in a bad spring, for instance — we record why.
Pasture access
Minimum 120 days at grass; group average 182
Every cow fit to walk goes out from roughly mid-April to mid-October, weather and ground conditions allowing. Five of our farms qualify for the Dutch meadow-milk standard of at least 120 days and six hours a day. Paddocks run on a 21-day rotation with grass covers measured weekly, so cows graze fresh leaf instead of chewing down bare ground.
Housing and lying comfort
One cubicle per cow, bedded and raked twice a day
No shared cubicles, ever — an overstocked shed is the fastest way to hock lesions and lame cows. Beds are sawdust or lime-and-straw, raked morning and evening. Barns are naturally ventilated with adjustable side curtains; above 22°C the fans and sprinklers over the feed fence cut in so cows keep eating through a hot spell.
Health and prevention
Fortnightly scoring, twice-yearly preventive hoof trimming
Locomotion, body condition and hock scores are recorded every two weeks by the herd manager. Hoof trimming is booked in advance for the whole herd, not called in when a cow is already three-legged. Our vets are on farm monthly for planned herd health work, which is when most problems get caught.
Calves
Four litres of colostrum within six hours of birth
Calves get tested colostrum, measured with a refractometer, within six hours. They stay in a barn with its own airspace, never sharing air with the milking herd, and are weighed at 14 and 56 days so poor growth is spotted before it becomes pneumonia. Bull calves are not sold at two weeks — they go to Hoeve Ommen and are reared within the group.
Medicine use
Below the Dutch DDDA action threshold on all eleven farms
Antibiotics are used when an animal is sick and needs them. They are never routine, never preventive across a whole group, and never used to push growth. Every treatment is logged against the individual animal, treated cows are milked last and separated, and our use is benchmarked per farm each quarter.
Transparency
Welfare figures to our buyers every quarter — good or bad
Calf mortality, lameness prevalence, cell counts and antibiotic use go to our processors and meat buyers four times a year. In 2024 our calf mortality rose at one farm after a rotavirus outbreak; we reported it, changed the colostrum protocol and reported the correction too.
Where we stand right now
Measured across all eleven farms and reported to our buyers each quarter. Two of these have improved a lot since 2019. One of them we are still not happy with.
- days at grass
- 182days at grassgroup average per cow, 2025
- lameness prevalence
- 4.1%lameness prevalencedown from 7.8% in 2019
- somatic cell count
- 168ksomatic cell countcells/ml, rolling bulk average
- calf mortality
- 3.2%calf mortalityfirst 90 days, group-wide
Calf rearing
Why we stopped selling bull calves
Until 2009 our bull calves left at two weeks for a market we had no visibility into. We did not like not knowing, so we built Hoeve Ommen.
Cows that are not needed to breed replacements are served with Belgian Blue or Limousin semen. Those calves are reared on our own farms, moved to Ommen at around twelve weeks, and finished on straw bedding with outdoor loafing yards and a ration built from our own grass and maize silage.
It costs more than selling at two weeks. What we get for it is an animal whose entire life happened inside the business — one owner, one health record, no long transport, and a buyer who can trace it back to the cow that carried it.
A lame cow does not eat properly, does not get in calf and does not last. Looking after her well and running a business well are the same job — I have never understood why people talk about them as if they pull in opposite directions.