DEFINING WELLBEING AND RESILIENCE ON ORGANIC DAIRY FARMS

The food systems in the U.S. (and around the globe) are changing. While the need for providing a sufficient quantity of nutritious food is still paramount, the nature of how food is produced is becoming more important to consumers. For food animal production systems, organic systems are rapidly becoming a key component of the U.S. food system and a model for sustainability. One of the important gaps in our understanding of organic dairy systems is the attributes and inputs to sustain a fully integrated soil, pasture, and animal system able to sustain high levels of resilience and productivity, i.e., system wellbeing. The methods and approaches described in our project support the development and maintenance of an Organic System Plan by demonstrating better documentation of health events, accurate assessments of soil and pasture health and utilization, and access to information to support the adoption of animal care processes. The novel aspects of our proposal are defining pasture and animal wellbeing and resilience and developing an integrated conceptual model that optimizes organic dairy systems.Our long-term research goal is to work with producers, veterinarians, and support consultants engaged in organic dairy production and focused on critical health, economic, and ecosystem issues on commercial dairy farms in the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the U.S. Our long-term extension goal is to effectively disseminate and implement research findings to encourage and support a thriving organic livestock industry. This proposal is addressing the critical need to understand and manage the inherent variability within organic dairy pasture-based systems. We currently lack research outcomes and extension programs that can explain the range of pasture and animal variability, and define successful strategies for organic system resilience and wellbeing.This field-based proposal has two objectives: 1) Develop a framework characterizing the nature of this interactive system of pastures and animals that defines a resilient organic dairy and healthy cows. 2) Develop an extension program that utilizes this knowledge to improve the resilience of commercial organic dairies. Objective 1 contains three aims: 1) Develop and implement tools to objectively define the time-dependent quality of organic pastures. 2)Describe the temporal, management, and environmental impacts on the fecal microbiome of cows on participant herd. 3) Describe animals, demographics, productivity, health, reproduction, and herd "survival" as the phenotypes that underpin resilience and wellbeing for all cows enrolled in the study. A critical gap in our understanding of organic dairy systems is defining the interrelationships between pasture and animal qualities that optimize system resilience and wellbeing. Pasture qualities include diversity, density, dry matter, nutrient quality, and root structure. Cow qualities include fecal microbiomes, health (e.g., postpartum disease, lameness, mastitis), and production metrics. The metrics for wellbeing are resilience of a system (pasture, animal) to both recover from short term perturbations and to express its potential across a range of environments.