There is a growing interest within the United States in ensuring management systems and strategies for animal agriculture are not only highly productive and cost efficient, but also provide for the welfare of animals raised within them. The benefit of this situation is the chance for an empirical approach to evaluating welfare across animal agriculture to make a valuable contribution to the public discourse. The overall objective of this presentation will be to address the challenges and opportunities to using interdisciplinary approaches to quantifying welfare. To narrow the scope of this paper, and provide a more cohesive narrative, examples from dairy production will be used to demonstrate the main concepts. The discussion of opportunities will focus on the interaction between traditional approaches to measuring welfare, such as behavior and productivity, and novel aspects of sleep, immune function, reproduction, or sociology. Sleep research on dairy cows provides a means to demonstrate how biologists, ethologists, and engineers can collaborate to redefine how the lying behavior of a dairy cow is assessed. Moving beyond ideas of immunosuppression and into the approaches to evaluate dysfunction of immune function may provide a more accurate assessment of the effect of a management strategy on a dairy cow or calf. End points commonly used to evaluation reproductive parameters, such as return to cyclicity in early lactation, could provide a means to evaluate the welfare of postpartum dairy cows. Finally, incorporation of sociologists provides a means to understand producers’ attitudes toward disease, pain, housing, and other factors that can alter dairy cow welfare. The discussion of the challenges of engaging in a multidisciplinary approach will focus on pain mitigation and immune function. These areas will be used as examples of the difficulties that might be encountered when the collection of one response variable affects another.