Co-operation between farm advisors

Dutch farmers are lucky. Distances are short and every farmer has the availability of many advisors from various sources at a relatively short distance. There is, however, not much co-operation between advisors. I was invited to give a presentation on a "flash-meeting" of the Dutch society for Agricultural Advisors (VAB) on the topic of co-operation between farm advisors. The idea was to give a short presentation and use this as starting point for discussion. Not too many participants were allowed in order to make discussion possible. My presentation was entitled: "Increasing the profitability of herd production programs". The slides are available on slideshare. 

The idea of my presentation was that there are three main groups of advisors on Dutch (dairy) farms: the veterinarian (in herd health programs and occasionally when there are health problems), the feed advisor and the economic advisor. Their knowledge overlaps, vets do know their thing about feed ratios and feed in relation to milk production, while economic advisors have a quite generic knowledge of the dairy farm. Besides knowledge on feed, feed advisors also have a generic knowledge about farming. Sometimes the advisors feel competition from the others, which might prevent co-operation. Moreover, most of the Dutch feed advisors are paid by the feed companies. Their advises are "free" (you pay them with the feed of course), while the other advisors have to be paid per hour. 

I have presented a couple of cases where each of the advisors could, from their point of view, give different advises for the same topic, and these advises might even contradict. 

We quickly agreed that co-operation between advisors is needed in order to improve the profitability of advises. We also agreed that it is the farmer who needs to direct these different advises. However, we are afraid that our dairy farmers are not (yet) good in that task. We do have some data (not published yet, if it is published I will let you know) that shows that in the relation between the dairy farmer and their veterinary advisor all kinds of things go wrong. The vet does overestimate the capabilities of the dairy farmer to ask questions and to take the lead. Well, if we know that that might happen, we should account for it. There might even be a role for one of the team of advisors to coach a farmer in this work. In our opinion, the advising team should meet, under direction of the farmer, to set goals for the coming one or two years. Those goals can be on production level, herd seize, health status, etc. Besides these goals a plan should be made how to reach the goals. The advising team should agree upon these goals and work in their coming individual visits on those goals. The farmer (maybe in co-operation with one advisor who coaches him/her on it) has to keep the team in good place and follow the progress of the plan. 

We were lucky that one of the participants had experience in coaching farmers to take the lead in setting up an advisor team. He was very enthusiastic and has had great successes using this approach. Although not all efforts succeeded, but most did. One example really stood out. This was in the 25 % worst performing farms (economically) and is now in the 25 % best performing farms. Wow, advise can be profitable. 

The challenge is to show this and to make the value of farm advise visual. That is a matter of marketing and we might learn a lot from ordinary business consultants in this. 

Rabies control

I have a PhD student named Ewaldus Wera. He is working at Kupang State Agriculture Polytechnic Univesity in Kupang, West Timor, Indonesia and has a grant from the Indonesian government to get his PhD at Wageningen University. After an initial time in Wageningen to do some courses and to set up his research plans, he went back for data collection. I had the pleasure to visit him in Indonesia. During my visit I had the honour to give a presentation on animal health economics to the veterinary students of Kupang State Agriculture Polytechnic and to visit the Animal Science facilities over there. It was great to find out that there were people there that were following my activities on the social media. Wow.

The most important part of my visit, however, was to make a site visit to the Island of Flores, where Ewaldus is doing is field work, in co-operation with the local animal health authoroties there.

The topic of his research: economics of rabies control. Indeed, a little different topic than most topics I discussin this blog, Nevertheless it is quite interesting. When I had to fly over, I had to make a stopover on Bali and on the airport there was a banner warning for rabies on the island. 

Warning banner as a welcome on the airport of Bali (after 15 hours of flying I was not able to keep my phone steady, so it is a bit fuzzy). 

Basically, rabies is a zoonotic disease that, in humans is always fata once clinical signs appear. The main transmission routes is through dog bites. There is a lot of information to be found on the internet, for instance here and here.

In Flores island alone, rabies is the cause of 19 human deaths per year. After the introduction of rabies, the local government has been taking quite a lot of efforts to eradicate rabies again from the island, without succes until now. Ewaldus has carried out an economic study to evaluate the costs that were associated with the control measures carried out since the year 2000 on Flores island. Currently, rabies control measures on Flores Island include mass vaccination and culling of dogs, laboratory diagnostics of suspected rabid dogs, putting imported dogs in quarantine, and pre- and post-exposure treatment (PET) of humans. 

Using a deterministic economic calculation model, Ewaldus estimated that the control measures were estimated to be US$1.08 million (range: US$0.57–1.42 million) per year. He presented his work at the last ISVEE meeting and the proceedings are available. Interestingly, Ewaldus not only looked at the costs of vaccination, but also at the costs of culling, especially at the value of the culled dogs. In Flores Island, dogs are a source of protein for the population (in other words, dogs are eaten) and dogs play an important role in chasing away monkeys, so that they do not damage the harvest. The consequence of taking those costs into account are that the costs of culling (semi) roaming dogs were the highest portion (about 39 % of the total costs). Post exposure treatment was the second highest portion of the costs (35 %). 

Ewaldus (orange shirt) and his data collection team in one of the villages in the field research

In Flores Island, there is a tendency towards less preventive measures and more PET. However, in the long run that may be more expensive then prevention. Next steps in the research are going to be aimed at the willingness of dog owners to co-operate with preventive measures and the costs-benefit of preventive measures. So you will be hearing more about his research in the future. 

One of the benefits of travel: Ewaldus took me to Kelimutu lakes, a beautiful spot, where volcanic lakes have totally different colours that even change over time. 

Mastitis detection on farms with an AMS

What a little tweet can do. A couple of weeks ago we had the annual meeting of the Dutch Mastitis Research workers. Dutch is here: Dutch language, because we meet with the mastitis research workers from the Netherlands as well as from Flanders (Belgium). It had my laptop with me and an internet connection, so from each talk I made a tweet. Personally I presented research entitled: "Consequences of farmers' interpretation of mastitis alerts". This work was done as research internship of a veterinary student (Klaske Buma, she is now working as practitioner) and mostly supervised by my colleague Ruurd Jorritsma from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine. 

The tweet of this presentation was: Results of internship of Klaske Buma: #AMS farmers check only 3.5% of mastitis alerts. As a result 74% of mastitis cases is missed 

As a result almost all Dutch farmers journals picked this up and wrote something about this item. Amazing how things go in the land of the journals. But given the interest in this little tweet, it is good to give a little more background on this item.

When milking cows with an automatic milking system (AMS), for mastitis detection, farmers have to rely on sensor alerts. It is known that, although the sensitivity and specificity of current mastitis are quite reasonable, the systems still give a relative large number of false positive alerts. In order to find detect all mastitis cases, farmers have to visually check all alerts. We do know that far from all farmers are doing that. The goal of this research was therefore to study farmers behavior related to mastitis alerts and the consequences thereof.

The study was done on 7 farms, located around one village in the north of the Netherlands. The farmers needed to be motivated to enter the study. All farms were milking with a Lely Astronaut (Lely, Rotterdam, the Netherlands) AMS. Each farm was visited five times. During each visit, the farmers were questioned about the alerts on the alert list of that day. After this questioning, the milk of all four quarters of every cow on the alert list was visually checked for clinical mastitis and was checked for subclinical mastitis using the CMT test.

During the first visit and before checking individual quarters, a questionnaire was held on the criteria farmers used for selecting cows on the alert list to be visually checked. Important criteria for farmers were, an alarming change in milk production, flakes and/or clots on the milk filter in combination with high electrical conductivity or a failed milking. Reasons for not checking alerts were: no flakes or clots on the milk filter, no change in milk production, cows that were repeatedly on the alert list or a lack of time.

In total 421 alerts were studied (see Table). Of all mastitis alerts, 60 % were not associated with mastitis. For the repeated alerts (cows that had been on the alert list earlier), 46 % of the alerts were not associated with mastitis.

Studied alets and mastitis
	Clinical mastitis	Subclinical mastitis	No mastitis	Total
Number of alerts	30	47	150	227
Number of repeated alerts	9	81	104	194
Total	39	128	254	421

Only 15 of the 421 quarter alerts were checked by the farmer (3 % of all alerts). From the checked alerts by the farmers, 67 % had clinical mastitis and 13 % had subclinical mastitis. However, the farmers missed quite a large number of mastitis cases. Of the 39 clinical mastitis cases that were found, only 10 were detected by the farmers, which means that 74 % of the clinical mastitis cases were not (yet) detected by the farmers.

In order to detect all clinical mastitis, farmers should check all alerts visually. For the 7 farmers in this study this would mean that, on average, 12 cows need to be checked each day. The question that remains is: how bad is it that so many cases of clinical mastitis are missed. Well for official EU milk quality regulations that is bad, because milk that has physical abnormalities should be withheld from delivery. On the other hand, many farmers that manually check the milk off their cows do detect flakes or little clots in the milk, squirt a few times more and deliver the milk as well, because the remaining milk is free of clots.

Is it bad for mastitis control? Well I do not know. Are the missed cases detected a few days later and does treatment at that time have similar cure probabilities? What is the probability of spontaneous cure of these "missed" mastitis cases. Interestingly, given all the fuss about this very interesting, but relatively small piece of work, we are thinking about future research.

Finally, for those interested, the topic will also be presented at the coming ECPLF conference in Leuven, Belgium.