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a more productive farm
When you are looking for a way to improve your livestock’s performance and farm profits, it is crucial to tackle animal diseases. When your animals get sick, they will be less profitable, or you will have to invest more to make them healthy again. Therefore, a preventive health approach will provide a more productive farm. One of the most effective ways to tackle animal diseases and to improve your livestock’s performance and farm profits, is implementing a comprehensive health planning strategy.
A comprehensive health planning strategy requires thorough planning and round table discussion involving all parties such as the farmer, the veterinarian, consultants, nutritionists and manufacturers of alternative solutions. They will create a unique strategy for each farm. Keep the following four principles in mind:
- Measure
- Manage
- Monitor
- Seek advice
Constantly revising this plan to improve health and welfare resulting in improving health and welfare.
A first step in developing your strategy to improve your farm productivity is a thorough analysis. Use your records of past years to identify the number of diseases and how much these cost your farm each year. Diseases can impact your farm productivity at different levels:
- Physical outputs: losses in meat or egg production
- Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR): sick animals need to eat more feed to add body mass compared to healthy ones
- Medication and veterinary costs
- Additional carcass disposal costs due to culling or increased mortality
- Extra labor to take care of the sick animals and for increased monitoring or inspection
The second step is to manage and develop your health plan always in consultation with your veterinarian or other stakeholders. A crucial element in managing health is prioritizing control measures for problem health areas to ensure prevention. When managing, always use cost/benefit calculations and the most effective health management methods. Agreed, preventive measures mean an extra cost. However, taking into account the cost of disease described above, preventive measures can be less costly as first estimated.
On a practical note, make sure your farm health plan is practical and easy to use, to make sure it brings added value. Definitively include protocols for treatment and prevention policies, as well as recordings of different parameters such as performance, disease incidence and number of treatments. Do not forget to take all basic principles of biosecurity at hand. Incorporate target and intervention levels for each potential issue. This allows you to monitor your farm specific plan at a later stage.
Once you have implemented your comprehensive health planning strategy, you must constantly monitor this. This is the third step. By regularly reviewing the progress of your health plan, you can adapt and take corrective measures if needed. Ideally, a health plan should involve the use of protocols and records, along with regular review and necessary actions. After action has been taken, follow-up should be conducted in order to determine whether the action is sufficient and seen to improve the farm situation.
A fourth aspect, is that you are not alone in this. Seek advice from specialists in different fields as prevention is better than cure. Do not forget to approach veterinarians, animal health consultants, nutritionists, suppliers of preventive measures such as feed additives, vaccines, disinfection and cleaning, etc. Whilst health plan development can benefit from competent external advice and needs to be formulated with agreed advice of all stakeholders, it is paramount that the farmer takes ownership of this process.
An animal health plan aims at contributing to on farm improvements through prevention and monitoring of animal health and welfare. Additionally, it also aims to find farm specific solutions for specific issues or challenges. The plan must become a dynamic document to be used as a tool in the management of the farm. To be meaningful, it is important that the farmer takes responsibility for the health plan and there should be a total alignment with the content. As the animal, the farmer, the vet/advisor and the consumer all require higher welfare, the health plan should be benefiting all of these stakeholders.
