The evaluation of 18 indicator groups consisting of 43 individual indicators is included in these three sub-areas. The assessment takes place online via the common technical platform www.farmlife.at . With a high degree of practicality in use, this assessment system focuses on the animal, but at the same time the assessment result should also allow conclusions to be drawn about the influencing factors and provide the farmer with recommendations for improving any husbandry or management deficiencies.
As part of two projects, the FarmLife Welfare Tool has been used on a number of Austrian dairy farms over the last two years. The practical application of this online tool in a total of 375 farm surveys resulted in overall index values in a range of 46 to 97 points and showed that management has a very strong influence on farm results regardless of the husbandry system. It can be deduced from this that only by taking management factors into account and including animal-related indicators can animal welfare and animal welfare potential on farms be depicted in an appropriate manner.
The FarmLife Welfare Index achieves its flexibility through the broad parameterization of the individual indicators. The robustness comes from a balanced arrangement of indicator groups in the three sub-areas. Testing the robustness of the FarmLife Welfare Index was part of this work. This important property could be confirmed.
While the FarmLife Welfare Index is already used extensively in practice for dairy farming, this tool was not yet available for calf and fattening cattle farming. As part of this project, a new set of indicators for FarmLife welfare assessment in calf and fattening cattle farming was developed. The first applications of the animal-related indicators for calves on farms allowed conclusions to be drawn about the practicability of the indicators. Further evaluation and testing of these new indicators on farms is recommended.
