Dairy Cow Stress is Complicated

Intuitively, in your own life, you recognize the risk of multiple stressors building on top of each other. Some days it can reach a point where everything comes crashing down. We call it the Jenga^® Effect.

For your cows, stressors can trigger all sorts of negative outcomes: reduced longevity, poor reproductive performance, immune dysfunction, lower milk production and component yield, and more.

Knowing how stressors interact – and how you can manage them – will help you keep your cows producing at a high level and help prevent unnecessary revenue losses.

Use this educational resource to learn about the many different stress factors and find solutions to reduce their damage. 

Our industry tends to view stressors one at a time. But stress is much more complicated and wide-ranging. Stress can surround cows at virtually all times in different ways. Some cows are more affected by it than others.

Genetics plays a big role, but so does management and nutrition. It takes a whole farm approach to keep cows comfortable, healthy and producing.

Every stressor can affect performance and profitability.

While heat stress attracts a lot of attention, the dozens of different stressors shown above also can affect cow health and performance and your farm’s profitability.

Social stressors come from a variety of sources. Production stages such as calving can be a stressor. Nutritional stressors can be physiological or they can be perceptual. With potential for stressors to trigger negative outcomes looming large, nutrition has to play a vital protective role. Learn more from Dr. Trevor DeVries in this Jefo RumiNation Podcast.

Stress factors interact, compounding the original issue and reducing revenue.

You see it in your cows. You know it about yourself. Stress grows. One stressful event creates stress elsewhere in your day and can even spread to those around you. The compounding effects of stress tell us that we can’t put stress factors such as heat, overcrowding, lameness, noise, weaning and more into silos. We view stress holistically. We help you care for your cows in the same way.

It’s the strain that matters.

Cows are stressed. The strain is how they respond to that stress, says Dr. Matthew Lucy, Ph.D., in a Jefo RumiNation podcast episode. Consider two cows who have the same levels of postpartum BHB but react differently. Or cows in a crowd, each reacting to that stress differently.

Once you have great genetics, management takes over. Great managers pay keen attention to nutrition. There is no substitution for good management and nutrition, says Dr. Lucy.