Udder health and communication

At this moment we are in the middle of an International Conference we organized on Udder Health and Communication. This conference is organized by the Dutch Udder Health Center (UGCN), GD Animal Health Service, the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine of Utrecht University and our Business Economics group at Wageningen University.

The idea behind this conference is that there is a lot of technical knowledge out there. We have the knowledge to prevent a large part (more than 75 %) of the udder health problems that are around on our farms. Additional knowledge is necessary for the additional 25 or less %.

So a large part of the udder health problems can be solved when currently available knowledge is applied. If we want to have an improved udder health, we have to motivate farmers to further control udder health. Farmers need to be motivated. An important motivator is economics: mastitis costs money (see our recent overview and the papers of Kirsten Huijps and Tariq Halasa). By changing incentives, for instance by rewarding farmers for better udder health (carrot) or giving penalties for bad udder health (stick), udder health can certainly be improved. However, money is no the only thing that motivates farmers. For instance, pleasure in work is an important motivator as well (see paper of Natasha Valeeva). So if we want to change the behaviour of dairy farmers we need to motivate them. Communication plays an essential role in that. Recently Theo Lam gave an overview of the current knowledge on that.

Because we learned that worldwide the interest in "how to communciate to farmers in order to improve udder health" is increasing we organised the conference. I got a couple of thoughts that made me wonder. Pieter Hemels (owner of a large communication firm, Hemels van der Hart) gave a keynote presentation and he indicated that an important aspect is the question: "what's in it for me". Many of the mastitis programs need the involvement of intermedial people, for instance veterinarians. So we should not only look at the dairy farmers: what's in it for them when they improve udder health, but also to the veterinarians: what's in it for them when they participate in a udder health improvement program. These questions should be asked during the setup of a program. "What's in it" can be very economically oriented: how much more profit do I make, but it can also be on other area's: my work becomes more fun, or I am gaining respect from my fellow veterinarians.

All in all a very interesting topic, which is way too wide to be covered in a simple posting to my Blog. For those interested, the proceedings of the conference are published as book.

Claw health, animal welfare and economics

When looking at production diseases in dairy cattle, the big four are: mastitis, reproduction, foot disorders and metabolic disorders. All of these disease problems have the same aspects, they are multi-factorial, which means that there might be different causes, different risk factors, different treatments and different preventive measures. This makes them complex. Of these diseases, mastitis receives the most attention. Mastitis is directly affecting the quality of milk and most probably the most expensive of these.

However, foot disorders are believed to be the most important production disease affecting cow welfare. Research shows that there is a high prevalence of foot disorders (up to 80 %) and foot disorders have a long duration and can be very painful.

Together with prof. Elsbeth Stassen, who holds the chair of Animals and Society in the department of Animal Sciences of Wageningen University, I advise Marielle Bruijnis, a PhD student who studies welfare and economic effects of foot disorders. A first thing Marielle studied was the economics of foot disorders. She showed that on average, foot disorders cost € 53 per average cow on the farm per year. This is an average, there might be large differences between farms because of a different prevalence, but also because of natural variation. Interesting was, that a relatively large proportion of these costs are caused by subclinical (not directly visible) foot disorders. Moreover, most of the costs are caused by milk production losses and increased risk of culling. This means that dairy farmers might very well underestimate the costs associated with foot disorders. These data have been published in a Journal of Dairy Science paper (volume 93; pages 2419-2432) and in a farmers journal (Veeteelt 27 (13): 50-52).

Marielle has continued her work estimating the welfare effect of different foot disorders (a paper on this has just been accepted for publication, so I will tell more about this later on) and has been combining the economics of foot disorders with the economics of foot disorders. The underlying question was that if the most important foot disorders (from an economic point of view) was less important from a welfare point of view, farmers might improve claw health, thinking they improved welfare also, but the latter should not necessarily be true. Fortunately, the economic and welfare effects of different claw disorders were quite well correlated. Marielle recently presented that at the UFAW (Universities Federation for Animal Welfare) conference and I had to pleasure to present the same data on the IDF World Dairy Summit, held in Parma in October 2011. You can find the slides and some more precise data on slideshare.