| dc.description.abstract | The aim of thesis was to identify whether lameness had an effect on milk production in Holstein Friesian dairy cows in Ireland. I focused my work on three dairy herds in the midlands of Ireland, in counties Kilkenny and Laois.
I visited the farms early in the lactation period, March 2015. I helped locomotion score the cows during this period; lame cows were identified and classified based on lame lesion. The lame cows were treated and returned to the herds. I obtained farm records from the lactation year of 2015, a ten-month period. I used three test day yield milk values for each cow (early, mid and late lactation). I removed any cow that did not stay non-lame for the duration of the lactation period from my dataset; this meant that I had 95 non-lame cows. I only included lame cows that were identified in the early lactation period, 37 cows. I separated the cows based on lactation; first lactation, second lactation and third lactation. | en_US |
