KATE WOODS

Mark Burwell holds the foot of his client in his hands and begins to carefully trim down the nail. He shapes the tip of each toenail into a precise curve and then carves out the abscess that has formed beneath the top layer. Burwell’s client lets out a muted “moo,” signaling the moment of relief she feels as the pressure from the abscess is relieved. 

 
Burwell, 58, has been giving cows pedicures for 22 years. He is one of roughly five thousand cow hoof trimmers in North America, and without them the modern dairy industry would cease to exist. The average dairy cow weighs 1,400 pounds, is milked two or three times a day, and lives in a concrete floor barn. Over time the cows' hooves suffer from supporting their own weight on the unforgiving concrete floors and the demanding milking schedule. When a cow’s hooves are hurt, the pain and stress from the injury causes them to stop walking, eating, and producing milk. 

 
“It’s like your car: if your tires aren’t good then you’re not going anywhere,” Burwell states.

Hoof trimming was not always a full-time career. Its formal origin can be traced to the 1960’s when Dutch farmers publicized their trimming technique, which became the first widely accepted method of trimming. The acceptance of the Dutch Method started a domino effect in which cows’ hoof health became regarded as a science and cemented regular hoof trimming as a necessity for the overall health of dairy cows. 

Burwell grew up watching his grandfather farm, and then joined the industry himself by first working for the Holstein Association and then overseeing a dairy farm. From these experiences, Burwell noticed a shift in the agriculture industry. He appreciated that farmers were becoming more aware of the importance of animal welfare and chose to become a hoof trimmer because he was drawn to the idea of making cows’ lives better. 

Even though hoof trimming videos receive over 500,000 views on social media platforms, giving cows pedicures is not just a cute TikTok trend. Most days Burwell is awake by 5:30 a.m. to arrive at a dairy farm with enough time in the day to trim at least 80 cows. On some farms he trims 120 cows’ hooves a day so the cows can remain healthy and productive. 

By the end of a workday, Burwell has been standing on his feet for around nine hours, handling 1,400-pound animals, and unsuccessfully dodging cow poop. It’s a job that most people who grab their strawberry yogurt, coffee creamer, and smoked gouda cheese from grocery store shelves would not want to do. Burwell finds satisfaction in the idea that he is giving some respect back to animals that give so much to the people who live off their delicious products, and he enjoys helping farmers learn how they can take care of their animals better.

“Education is a large part of my business,” says Burwell. “I mean, what I actually do for the cows is important, but educating the farmer on what actually needs done, then convincing him to do it, and then showing him the economic value of it is real important.” 

Burwell instructs farmers on how they can keep their cows’ feet healthy in between trimmings. In his ideal world, Burwell would not have to remedy digital dermatitis, hoof bruising, white line defects, and abscesses. Instead, each trim would be a maintenance checkup to just shorten the hoof rather than relieve a sore one. To achieve this ideal, Burwell advocates for farmers to give their herd foot baths, build large enough stalls for the cows to lay down, and spread comfortable bedding or ground cover over the concrete floors that are in the area of the barn apart from the milk parlor. 

While Burwell is an advocate for humane treatment of animals, he also recognizes the economic incentive of keeping dairy cows healthy. Dairy farmers invest roughly $1,000 to $2,000 in raising each cow before they are old enough to produce milk. One neglected hoof can wipe out that two-year investment in a few weeks. The dairy farmers are faced with the choice of losing that thousand-dollar investment or paying Burwell 12 dollars per cow trimming. It is the perfect example of where financial incentives and humane practices are in harmony in the farming industry. 

In modern times, the animal agriculture industry has been scrutinized by animal rights groups as well as some within the industry itself for what people consider inhumane treatment of the animals. For the dairy industry, the increase of conscious consumers means that shoppers are forgoing traditional dairy products for plant-based alternatives or looking for branding that totes “pasture-raised,” which means the cow needs to be allowed to graze and live on pasture for at least 30% of the year. 

“Organic” is another buzzword for discerning shoppers. According to the USDA, a cow’s milk is considered organic if her food contains no growth hormones, she is not given antibiotics, and her pasture has no chemical treatments. Burwell works for both organic and non-organic farms, but admits that he prefers working on the non-organic farms because when he is treating the cows’ hooves he is able to use topical antibacterial medicine as a first option to remedy the issues. On organic farms, Burwell must wait for the farmer to exhaust all other methods of healing the cow without antibiotics, which can cause the animal to suffer longer. If the cow cannot be healed organically, farmers are legally obliged by the USDA to treat their cows with antibiotics, which means the animal is no longer considered an organic dairy cow and must be sold to a non-organic beef or dairy market. 

 
Burwell supports the work being done on organic dairy farms, but he wants consumers to consider that organic farming is not the only way to produce products humanely. “It needs to be understood that most farmers that are in agriculture, whether they till the land, whether they have sheep or cows, they have to perform at their highest levels in order to be profitable,” he says, “We want these animals to be performing at their peak levels, so consequently we want them to be as comfortable as possible.” To keep cows comfortable, dairy farmers employ nutritionists, veterinarians, hoof trimmers, and engineers to design barns. 

The standard treatment of livestock has evolved exponentially since the rise of industrial agriculture in the early 1900s. In 1900, 41 percent of the American workforce worked in agriculture, but in 2020 only 1.8 percent of the country’s population worked on farms. The reason for this decrease was due to inventions that allowed farmers to produce larger amounts of product faster with less manpower. Americans moved away from rural towns and agriculture jobs to pursue careers in urban locations. Small farms became outliers rather than the status quo because it was easier for farmers to turn a profit with the larger herds they had since it was cheaper to buy in mass fertilizer, feed, and the other supplies needed to keep a herd healthy. 

The adoption of industrial agriculture methods also meant that the living conditions for livestock changed. As dairy farming became more of a mass operation, to make up for the small farms that had gone out of business and to keep milk products on urban grocery store shelves, farmers had to learn how to house large herds of cows. The larger the herd, the more chance for infections and illnesses to spread in the old-fashioned, dirt-floor barns. The solution was to build barns with concrete floors, because concrete was easy to wash. Although the concrete flooring is more sanitary, overtime it creates problems for cows’ feet such as hoof overgrowth and pressure on the central part of the foot, which causes lameness. 

When cows spent most of their lives outdoors, their hooves would naturally wear down due to walking around the rough pasture outside. Today, dairy cows spend much of their time laying in their stalls or walking on the smoother concrete floors, which means their hooves grow more quickly than they naturally wear down. This is where hoof trimmers like Burwell come in.  

At Meadow Run Dairy Farm in Waynesboro, Va., farmer Ben Cline, 36, relies on Burwell’s expertise. “There’s no one that knows more than him,” Cline says. Cline considers Burwell the best hoof trimmer in the area because he says that Burwell checks every part of each cow’s four hooves. Employing Burwell is part of Cline’s vision to turn his family’s farm into an award-winning dairy. He wants his farm to have the cleanest barns, high-tech machinery, and the happiest cows. “I want it to be a dairy farm where you would want to take the President,” Cline says. 

 
Cline is proud to be a dairy farmer and wants to elevate the reputation of the industry. He reads the newest studies that come out about how to best care for his herd. He likes to take a hands-off approach to dairy farming. He tries to stay out of the cows’ way while they are being milked, giving birth, and eating, so they can live their lives without constant human interjection. Part of this plan required him to invest in a fully robotic milking system.  

Cline shares Burwell’s view that cows are more productive when they are comfortable, which is why he promotes the robotic milking system even though opponents say that its lack of regimented schedule yields less milk and profits. “They’re not looking at it in terms of keeping the cow happy and comfortable to enable her to produce more milk,” Cline says, “I can show anybody that has time or that’s a naysayer to look at these numbers; the more time I spend out of this barn, away from these cows, the more production they give.” 

While Cline is changing the way he runs his farm to focus more on his cows’ welfare, one part that has remained constant since he began helping his grandfather in the barn 30 years ago is hoof trimming. “If we didn’t have Mark [Burwell] here trimming hooves, it would be a disaster. Cows would develop ulcers, or abscesses, or their claws would grow so long that they would never get up from laying down,” Cline says.

 
Farmers like Cline make Burwell proud of his role in the dairy industry, but his belief that each cow deserves humane treatment keeps him going. “We raise these animals to eat or to live off their production,” Burwell says, “At least we need to be in a situation where we give her a little bit of respect.”