Herd health planning improves profits

THE driver to encourage farmers to engage in herd health planning would be increased profitability – proving the cost benefits on demonstration farms in order to get others motivated.

Farms involved in herd health planning would see other benefits besides increased profits, such as better cow welfare, but this was not what would attract the attention of other farmers.

“Farm health planning will be led by healthy profits,” said Rod Welford, of the Millcroft Veterinary Group, at a Farm Health Planning stakeholders meeting held at Cockermouth, Cumbria.

Mr Welford is involved in the XLVets Dairy Herd Health Project, one of the regional initiatives that secured Defra funding this summer in order to promote health planning.

This particular project – like others round the country – has established advocate farms, demonstration units to show how farm health plans could be used to make positive and profitable changes.

Having promoted the project to local farmers, the stakeholders meeting was held to encourage the wider industry to get involved and spread the message.

Therefore the meeting at Cockermouth was for people working in allied industries – nutritionists, consultants and financial advisers among others.

Mr Welford said they all had a role to play in spreading the message of ‘measuring disease, then managing it, then monitoring progress’.

This would not necessarily be a short process. A quick reduction in prevalence might be seen with some diseases (such as mastitis), but slower progress would be made with others (such as Johnes).

The idea was for vet time spent on farm to be an investment for the farmer. Calling the vet out for an emergency treatment was not money well spent, but calling him out for consultation work was.

In the same way, preventative medicines were not as good an investment as finding ways to remove the need for them – for example, spending money reducing mastitis prevalence rather than buying mastitis tubes.

Showing the meeting a graphic of average vet spends, Mr Welford said: “I do not think it matters where you are on that graph as long as you’re getting a return on that money you spend.”

He used an example of one farm in his practice where the calving interval had been reduced by 32 days. The vet input to do this had cost 0.17ppl but the saving was 0.97ppl, and that was just for the improved calving interval and not the reduced cull rate or reduced services to conception.

“It’s all about investing in health, not paying for disease,” he said.