Litter makes cows sick in the Netherlands

This is shown by a study by a Master's student in Economics from Wageningen University, commissioned by environmental organisation Recycling Network Benelux, which attempts to map the financial impact of litter on animal husbandry for the first time.

During mowing, pieces of discarded cans or other litter sometimes end up in the cattle feed. These pieces cause injuries in the stomachs of cattle. Veterinarians know this injury as "hardware disease" (scherp-in). This can lead to reduced milk production, illness and sometimes death of the animal.

The numbers

250 livestock farmers from the Netherlands responded to the survey about their experiences with "hardware disease" in the past five years. The survey was thus answered by 0.95 per cent of the total professional group of Dutch livestock farmers.

In the responses to the online survey, 151 of the 250 Dutch respondent-farmers, i.e. 60.4 per cent, said they had had at least one animal with hardware disease in the past five years. They estimate that litter is the cause of the injury in 73 per cent of cases. Among the 250 farmers, this is expected to involve 520 animals that sustained hardware disease injuries as a result of litter over the past five years, out of their reported livestock population of 40,577 animals. Of these, 184 animals are reported to have died.

In order to correct for possible bias where victims are quicker to respond to a survey about the problem, a reference study was also conducted. Possible overrepresentation in the survey of affected farmers was therefore corrected with a weighting factor. This makes extrapolations to the entire Dutch livestock sector possible. These statistics must be used with the necessary caution, and therefore margins of error for the estimate are indicated in each case.

Weighted by the reference study and extrapolated to the total Dutch cattle population, this gives the following estimate: in the Netherlands, an average of between 11,448 and 13,110 cows sustain hardware disease injuries annually as a result of litter, of which between 3,813 (lower limit) and 4,244 (upper limit) cattle die annually, out of a total national population of 4.29 million cattle.