ODOS Tech and CowSignals® Partner to Bring Welfare and Climate Action Together on Every Dairy Farm
A new partnership between ODOS and CowSignals® is laying the groundwork for a global, science-backed standard that unites animal welfare and climate performance in dairy.
The CowSignals® Welfare App will be built inside the ODOS platform, so cooperative technicians can capture welfare, carbon footprint, and biodiversity in a single farm visit.
What the partnership delivers
ODOS Tech and CowSignals® share an ambition to reach 10 million farms measured for welfare and sustainability together. In practice, this means cooperative auditors can now capture welfare scoring alongside carbon footprint and biodiversity data in a single farm visit, with no extra burden on the farmer or the technician.
Why this matters
The dairy sector is racing to deliver measurable climate progress. Mitigation products are critical and will remain a cornerstone of the climate strategy. But the largest untapped lever in many herds today is not a new product. It is the cow herself. Welfare and lifetime productivity drive both performance and emissions intensity, with no additional inputs required.
The science supports this. Reducing lameness improves feed conversion efficiency. Lower replacement rates extend the productive lifetime of the herd, compounding into lower emissions per litre of milk. Doubling cow lifetime alone can deliver around 30% methane reduction. Research by CowSignals® founder Joep Driessen has shown that every CowSignals® point translates directly into a better feed return over feed costs.
By bringing welfare scoring into the same workflow as carbon and biodiversity, cooperatives gain something they have not had before: a clear diagnosis of why each farm performs the way it does, and where the highest-impact interventions lie. Welfare becomes a quantified line in the farm’s emission reduction plan, not a separate report.
Why ODOS and CowSignals®
The partnership brings together two organisations with deep, complementary expertise.
ODOS Tech is an end-to-end sustainability platform that turns climate data into action for livestock companies. Founded by two PhD researchers from Dublin, we enable companies to reduce emissions, improve productivity, measure biodiversity, and plan a credible path to net-zero. Backed by science, built for farmers. The platform today supports over 10,000 farms across Europe and works with more than 30 major dairy cooperatives and agri-food processors, including Carbery, Central Lechera Asturiana, Kaiku, Schreiber Foods, and COVAP.
CowSignals® is the global dairy welfare standard, built on more than 25 years of veterinary practice across continents, over 500 trainer franchises, and more than 100,000 trained advisors and farmers worldwide. Founded by veterinarian Joep Driessen, the CowSignals® methodology is the most widely adopted approach to dairy welfare assessment in the industry, scientifically rigorous and practical to deploy at scale.
Together, the two organisations combine the most widely adopted welfare methodology in the industry with one of the leading climate action platforms for livestock, giving cooperatives a credible, evidence-based path to reduce emissions while improving herd health and farmer margins.
