Improvement of animal health is a crucial challenge in organic farming to meet customers’ demands with respect to healthy food from healthy animals. Grasping animal health as an emergent property of the whole farm system, a systemic approach has been used to analyse the farm specific interaction of health related factors and to select the most effective measures to improve animal health.
By making use of an impact matrix, the interactions of 22 health relevant variables were evaluated and their systemic roles calculated on 10 organic farms with fattening pigs. Recommendations related to variables identified as ‘active’ variables enable the farmer to invest limited resources where they might provide the highest impact. The results indicate that general recommendations regarding health management are not valid and should be replaced by the development of farm specific strategies that strive for on an acceptable level of animal health status on farm level
