The marketing of herd health and production management services on Dutch dairy farms: perceptions of dairy farmers and their veterinary surgeons

A questionnaire-based survey on veterinary herd health and production management services was conducted on 194 specialist dairy veterinarians and 466 dairy farmers. The farmers were randomly selected from greater than 6,000 farmer clients of the surveyed veterinarians. This paper reports these survey findings and the findings of an earlier survey conducted among the veterinarians. The survey included questions on the attributes of the service itself, the practitioners delivering the service, reasons for participation and the expected future of herd health and production management services. Reasons farmers participated in herd health and production management programmes included; access to routine screening of their herd; increasing profits; and receiving regular veterinary advice or solutions to remedy existing problems. Advantages of participation named included: good management support; higher profits; structural solutions to problems; and being better informed. Differences between farming styles were observed, pointing to the different needs and goals of farming styles. Farmers cited high costs and the time investment required as major disadvantages. The proportion of farmers citing these reasons was lower than expected by the veterinarians. In the future, preventive healthcare will be the main reason of farmers to participate. Farmers who are not using the service can potentially be encouraged to engage the services after gaining increased insight into the herd health and management service structure, the planning of activities, the cost-benefit of the service, veterinary surgeons being more co-operative with other farm advisors and veterinarians being more willing to pay attention to quality issues on the dairy farm

Veterinary dairy herd fertility service provision in seasonal and non-seasonal dairy industries - a comparison

The decline in dairy herd fertility internationally has highlighted the limited impact of traditional veterinary approaches to bovine fertility management. Three questionnaire surveys were conducted at buiatrics conferences attended by veterinary practitioners on veterinary dairy herd fertility services (HFS) in countries with a seasonal (Ireland, 47 respondents) and non-seasonal breeding model (The Netherlands, 44 respondents and Portugal, 31 respondents). Of the 122 respondents, 73 (60%) provided a HFS and 49 (40%) did not. The majority (76%) of all practitioners who responded stated that bovine fertility had declined in their practice clients' herds with inadequate cow management, inadequate nutrition and increased milk yield as the most important putative causes. The type of clients who adopted a herd fertility service were deemed more educated than average (70% of respondents), and/or had fertility problems (58%) and/or large herds (53%). The main components of this service were routine postpartum examinations (95% of respondents), fertility records analysis (75%) and ultrasound pregnancy examinations (69%). The number of planned visits per annum varied between an average of four in Ireland, where breeding is seasonal, and 23 in Portugal, where breeding is year-round. The benefits to both the practitioner and their clients from running a HFS were cited as better fertility, financial rewards and job satisfaction. For practitioners who did not run a HFS the main reasons given were no client demand (55%) and lack of fertility records (33%). Better economic evidence to convince clients of the cost-benefit of such a service was seen as a major constraint to adoption of this service by 67% of practitioners

Imbedding HACCP principles in dairy herd health and production management: case report on calf rearing

Driven by consumer demands, European legislation has suggested the use of HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) as the quality risk management programme for the whole dairy chain. Until now, an exception has been made for primary producers, but as regulations evolve, on-farm HACCP-like programmes should be ready to assure food safety as well as animal health and animal welfare. In our field experiment, the HACCP-concept was used to combine both optimal farm management and formalisation of quality assurance in an on-farm situation in the Netherlands. The process of young stock rearing was chosen, since its importance for the future of the farm is often underestimated. Hazards and their associated risk factors can be controlled within the farm-specific standards and tolerances, as targets can be controlled by corrective measures and by implementation of farm-specific worksheets. The veterinarian is pivotal for the facility-based HACCP team, since he/she has knowledge about on-farm risk assessment and relations between clinical pathology, feed and farm management. The HACCP concept in combination with veterinary herd health and production management programmes offers a promising approach to optimise on-farm production processes (i.e., young stock rearing) in addition to a structural approach for quality risk management on dairy farms