BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Animal Behavior and Welfare
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Future of Farm Animal Welfare Science: Selected Papers from the 9th International Conference on the Welfare Assessment of Animals at Farm Level (WAFL)View all 13 articles
Brief research report: Fertility, teat-and body condition of foster cows in a cow-calf contact system
Provisionally accepted
- Universitat Kassel Fachbereich 11 Okologische Agrarwissenschaften, Witzenhausen, Germany
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
One alternative to early cow-calf separation is continuous foster cow-calf contact, where one cow nurses two to four calves without being milked. However, multiple suckling may compromise teat and body condition and affect fertility. Therefore, the prevalence of dry teats, teat lesions, abnormal body condition scores (BCS >3.75 or <2.5), rapid BCS changes (>0.5 absolute range), calving intervals and number of inseminations to conception were compared between 18 foster cows kept in two groups of 11-12 cows with 46 to 48 calves and 18 milked cows in a commercial Holstein-Friesian herd. Four scorings were conducted in ~4-week intervals from weeks 2-16 postpartum. The last scoring was during weaning in one foster group and after weaning in the other. Associations between foster cows' BCS and teat lesions were further analyzed. Teat lesion prevalence was significantly higher in foster cows between weeks 10-14 postpartum, but not during or after weaning, indicating increasing calf independence from milk. Given that teat lesions may cause pain, increase infection risk, and reflect negative cow-calf interactions, they represent a welfare concern. No significant differences were found in teat dryness, overall body condition, or fertility outcomes. However, foster cows showed a trend toward overconditioning (BCS >3.75) from weeks 6-16, and those with lesions had a numerically higher BCS (medium effect size). These results suggest that larger scaled studies are needed to investigate the causes of teat lesions, particularly in relation to individual cow acceptance of multiple suckling in foster systems.
Keywords: Animal Welfare, Body condition score (BCS), Calf rearing, Cow-calf contact, Dairycow, Milking, Nursing, udder health
Received: 01 Aug 2025; Accepted: 17 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zipp, Franz-Wippermann and Knierim. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Katharina A. Zipp
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.