An Observational Study Investigating Uniformity of Manual Body Condition Scoring in Dairy Cows

: Body condition scores (BCS) are very useful for dairy herd management; however, its reliability and consistency of recordings made by observers have been questioned. Moreover, regular high-quality manual body condition scoring of an individual cow is difficult as a routine practice on the farm. This study aimed to find out the agreement in BCS within- and between the observers. An observational study was conducted in which two observers independently scored BCS of 43 crossbred animals from one dairy hard. Cohen’s kappa (κ ) and spearman’s rho (ρ) was computed to quantify the agreement between observer for overall BCS measurement and only kappa test for different BCS groups (high, medium and low). For overall BCS score ê of 0.62 to 0.71 (p<0.001) and 0.68 to 0.74 (p<0.001) were obtained for intra observer 1 and 2 respectively, such values would be interpreted as moderate agreement. Whereas, the inter-observer agreement (ê) was found to be low i.e. between 0.52 to 0.60 (p<0.001). However, the spearman’s rho value was higher in all the cases, indicating a good correlation among the individual observers. Besides, kappa value (κ ) for different BCS groups revealed the lowest agreement between observers (0.31 to 0.37, p<0.001) and within observers (0.34 to 0.59, p<0.001) for medium BCS group as compared to the other BCS groups. These findings suggest multiple observers should perform manual Body Condition Scoring for better accuracy in the outcome.