Perceptions on health changes
This study presented the opinion of farmers and professional service providers (including veterinary practitioners and agricultural industry professionals) on non-regulatory bovine health concerns in Ireland. The study looked at health concerns that directly reflected the work areas of AHI (Table 1). However there are multiple actors influencing the industry, which itself is constantly evolving. While some changes can be attributed to the work of AHI, the aim of this study was not an evaluation of the AHI programmes, which is not appropriate for this type of survey, but rather to gather the perception of changes that have occurred.
The largest driver for change in the dairy industry, the abolition of milk quotas, provided an incentive for an increase in efficient production, allowing dairy farming to become more profitable in the Irish context. Ireland saw an increase in the average dairy herd size over last ten years from 64 animals in 2010 to 80 animals in 2019, with a corresponding increase in milk production per hectare [18]. These changes were supported by Knowledge Transfer programmes and advisory services developed and delivered by a range of players, including DAFM, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority (Teagasc) and AHI. These provided direct communication of best practice to farmers, with ongoing discussion groups nationally in both beef and dairy, at regular meetings discussing improvements in technical, financial and scientific knowledge. The last decade also saw major development of genetic evaluations and improvements in the quality of the national herd by the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation (ICBF). While these efforts were initially focused on the dairy herd, progress has also been made in beef breeds. Breeding and economic evaluations have been developed for the selection of genetically superior animals with improvements of quality and performance such as fertility, calving ease and more recently, the health conditions bovine tuberculosis and liver fluke. The AHI programmes have been operating alongside, often in collaboration with, these other developments, exerting variable direct influence on these bovine health outcomes.
There was broad agreement across sectors and respondents with regard to BVD, recognising that there had been substantial improvement. This mirrors the technical progress made to date at the farm level from 2013 to 2019 with herd prevalence decreasing from 11.3 to 0.77% and animal prevalence decreasing from 0.66 to 0.04% during this period (Table 1). The slightly lower rankings on BVD from all respondents regarding the fattening/finishing sector may reflect the fact that the eradication programme is addressed primarily to breeding herds. While fattener/finishing herds are beneficiaries of this programme through the removal of persistently infected animals before they reach this production stage, this appears not to be fully acknowledged.
Udder health and milk quality were also viewed positively by all respondents within the dairy sector. The AHI CellCheck programme has contributed to this issue, providing a national focus agreed by all stakeholders towards a substantial improvement in national milk quality, as measured through bulk milk tank somatic cell count (SCC), and reduced intramammary antimicrobial usage, both at drying off and during lactation [34]; C.I. McAloon, personal communication). The increase in efficient milk production has been an important incentive for a decrease in SCC and mastitis, as this would complement quality and efficiency of production. Additionally, messaging around colostrum intake has been widely promoted by AHI and the knowledge exchange programmes to improve calf welfare and health. The decreased prevalence of BVD would have also influenced calf health positively.
In contrast, Johne’s disease was reported as showing less improvement, with professional service providers being less positive in their responses than farmers. These views are reasonable given that the lack of national agreement, until very recently, about appropriate strategies for national Johne’s disease control. The Irish Johne’s Control Programme, a voluntary programme coordinated by AHI, was launched in 2017 following substantial planning and research, and has subsequently been implemented in a relatively limited number of Irish dairy herds. There is some evidence of increasing herd prevalence of Johne’s disease in Ireland over the last several decades [24, 30], although accurate measurement of herd prevalence has proved challenging [31]. A number of reasons have been identified facilitating dissemination of infection within Irish herds, including the introduction of many animals with the national move to the single EU market in 1992 (affecting both dairy and pedigree beef breeds for improved performance traits) [8] and substantial levels of within-country movement [32]. Other challenges are not country-specific, including the use of imperfect diagnostic tests, a prolonged disease course and sub-optimal farm biosecurity [24]. Over the last 10 years, there have been concerted efforts towards improved farmer awareness of these issues, in part through AHI’s biosecurity activities and Irish Johne’s Control Programmes, and from dairy processors and within Teagasc discussion groups.
The monitoring and feedback of liver and lung lesions at slaughter, directly related to AHI’s Beef HealthCheck programme (Table 1), was also viewed differently by farmers and professional service providers, being viewed very positively by farmers, particularly those in the fattener/finisher sector. Reports from Beef HealthCheck are delivered directly to farmers on an individual basis, for on-farm decision making, with more generalised results aimed at a wider audience, which would include professional service providers, where they may lose apparent utility. The highest ranking from farmers in the fattener/finisher sector may reflect the fact that the programme is particularly relevant to herds that are slaughtering larger numbers of cattle.
Perceptions on prioritisation
This study provides stakeholder insights into priority issues relevant to non-regulatory bovine health that need to be tackled over the next 10 years. These issues, which are in general agreement with broader societal concerns, include resistance by pathogenic organisms to medications, including both antimicrobial resistance against bacterial infections and anthelmintic resistance for treatments against parasitic infections; greenhouse gas emissions; and animal welfare incorporating calf and cow welfare, as well as lameness specifically.
Improvements in animal health, for example BVD eradication, improved milk quality and reduced parasite load, are associated with production efficiencies, and therefore the potential for equivalent output from fewer animals and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. This was highlighted in a study by Williams et al. [45], who reported the potential for 2–5% reductions in greenhouse gas emissions with improved animal health. Improving animal health and economic breeding indices are mitigation measures with regard to agricultural methane by improving animal production efficiency [1, 28]. Indeed, the recently revised Marginal Abatement Cost Curve for Irish agriculture [28] shows that animal health measures have a contribution to make to greenhouse gas abatement, contributing an annual average mitigation over the next ten years of 147ktCO2e. This is broadly similar to that achieved by improved nitrogen use efficiency or low emission slurry spreading and represents some 7.3% of the total average annual savings. Furthermore, these savings are shown to be cost-beneficial in terms of achieving this abatement.
An understanding of these priority areas is relevant to the ongoing work of AHI, which provides national leadership in non-regulatory bovine health issues. However, these issues are complex, requiring a more sophisticated and collaborative response than was required when considering animal health alone and indeed an issue attributable to a single pathogen. That said, these identified future priorities are already being addressed, at least in part, through ongoing national work, including by AHI. For example, BVD eradication contributes to reduced on-farm antimicrobial usage by mitigating the cohort-level immunosuppressive impact of BVD, particularly in younger animals [25, 29]. Further, herds with reduced SCC have fewer clinical and subclinical cases of mastitis and therefore less need for in-lactation intramammary antimicrobial usage and also have a greater potential to transition from blanket to selective dry cow therapy without excessive risk [34].
AHI will need to continue to work collaboratively with other organisations (noting, for example, a very broad multi-agency response to antimicrobial resistance), taking the lead in specific areas where appropriate. Recent strategies, for example the antimicrobial work in support of iNAP [17], and the convening by DAFM of an Antiparasitic Resistance Stakeholder Group (of which AHI is a member), represents an ongoing shift towards integrated, multiagency action on complex issues. A follow-on to this survey involving a consultative process will be particularly important to identify how AHI can best contribute to these issues as part of a wider response. In addition, AHI has been tasked to ‘Explore the feasibility of broadening the beef and dairy health programmes and strategies for implementation’ under the banner of animal health programmes [16] as a contribution to a number of wider measures on climate action.
Methodological limitations
The use of an online platform to elicit opinion provides both advantages in the potential to maximise coverage from diverse stakeholder groups given limited resources, and disadvantages in the collection of relatively superficial information using a survey-type approach which can have limited response rates in certain groups with the potential for bias. Unfortunately, in this study the response rates could not be measured for all respondent types, as participants were anonymous and therefore the nature of any bias remains unknown. In order to overcome these limitations, it is preferable that this work be followed by a form of in-depth interviews or workshops, with key representatives and a focus on future priorities.
Eliciting priorities on one substantive policy domain from different types of stakeholder requires a careful use of surveys as a data-gathering instrument. The work here was informed by the methodological considerations that have been disseminated across the social science community in the form of cognitive aspects of survey methodology (CASM) scholarship (see Tourangeau [41] for a review). CASM informed our survey design in the following three ways. First, we chose our language carefully in our response format, including a don’t know/not relevant option, but explicitly omitting a neutral response on the basis that we wanted to elicit more truly held responses rather than more non-committal ones. Although some participant feedback indicated a level of frustration that they could not include a neutral response in their answers, we reasoned that the benefits to be gained from excluding a neutral option outweighed the felt frustration of some respondents. Secondly, we restricted the cognitive burden of participants by only asking them to give three priorities in the second part of the survey: this increased the likelihood that the participants would have processed their responses more deeply than if we had asked them to prioritise a longer list of items. Third, we tried to take account of a participant’s sense of the importance of any one priority by using a weighted response model that adjusted as a function of the number of priorities identified by any one participant.
Almost one third of professional (non-farmer) participants were associated with AHI in some way as working group members. Therefore, these participants are likely more familiar than other respondents with some of the selected non-regulatory bovine health issues under consideration, and of the work of AHI on these issues over the last ten years. Compared to their non-affiliated colleagues, it is plausible that these stakeholders were more likely to indicate that the situation was ‘much better’. However, this positive skew was limited to an average across health concerns of 7.2% of affiliated participants indicating a ‘much better’ situation, which was offset by a decrease of 5.0% in the ‘somewhat better’ categories and an increase of 0.9% in the ‘worse’ categories, compared to non-affiliated colleagues. For simplicity in presenting results, it was decided to keep these participant categories aggregated. Notable outliers to this average relate to BVD (16.9% increase in ‘much better’; 12.4% decrease in ‘somewhat better’), udder health/milk quality (28.9% increase in 'much better'; 16.9% decrease in ‘somewhat better’) and Johne’s disease (increase 7.7% in ‘worse’) when comparing affiliated to non-affiliated participant responses. This bias was therefore not positive in all cases from those individuals who were likely to be well informed. Additionally, despite the positive skew, professional responses were on the whole more conservative than those of farmers.
One confound affects the study design here, that of self-selection; by self-selection, it is meant that certain kinds of groups in the universe of potential respondents are overrepresented in the final sample. It is plausible that farmers within the HerdPlus programme are self-selecting into surveys on bovine health as they have already involved themselves in initiatives and programmes to improve bovine health. By extension, this would mean that the survey owners would need to do more to include farmers who may be inferred to be less interested in bovine heath. Due to budgetary and time constraints, systematic efforts to make sure that potentially underrepresented farmer groups were not made. The reasons for the low response rate were also not able to be investigated. The nature of the survey (online) might have precluded those that are less technologically minded and although it was possible to participate on a phone, many participants may have preferred using a computer, requiring desk time – a limited resource for farmers who are primarily active on-farm. The open online nature of the survey with access via a public link may have encouraged multiple responses but these were limited to 1.6% of the total respondents and were unlikely to have had a great influence. For these reasons, the results from this study need to be interpreted with care.
