Monitoring veterinary medicine usage to improve animal performance and efficiency

Challenges

Diseases caused by viruses, bacteria and parasites are responsible for large reductions in animal performance and compromise the environmental and economic sustainability of livestock farming. Estimates suggest that the helminth parasites alone cost the UK ruminant livestock industry almost £300 million annually. To tackle the impact of these pathogens, farmers rely on a wide range of veterinary pharmaceuticals, such as antibiotics, anthelmintics and vaccines. It is, however, crucial that treatments are applied appropriately to ensure they have maximum efficacy. Inappropriate treatment timing, dosage or product choice represents unnecessary financial costs. Overuse of these treatments can also contribute to the development of antimicrobial and anthelmintic resistance.

The performance-limiting impact of such diseases is not well-quantified outside of experimental settings, and we have relatively little information on the impact of disease on performance under “real-world” conditions. Veterinary treatment records represent a source of data that is routinely collected by producers and provides information on both the medicine practices on-farm, and the diseases that animals are affected by. However, addressing medicine usage and quantifying the impact of disease on performance is a demanding task. It requires links to be made between on-farm records of veterinary medicines, and measures of performance collected either on-farm and at the abattoir when the animal is slaughtered. Furthermore, these data must be collected at the level of the individual animal to quantify associations between treatments and performance. Finally, such data sets are potentially both large and complex, with missing data and many confounding variables and so require sophisticated statistical techniques to analyse robustly.

Medicine data as a proxy for disease status

Medicine usage data represents an excellent proxy for the disease status of the individual animal. We have explored the use of large-scale data on health records and performance in beef cattle using abattoir data in collaboration with Scotbeef Ltd and Innovent Technology Ltd. Our focus has been on liver fluke infection since infection status can be inferred from the liver condition at slaughter, and we have found that:

• Fluke infection has a significant impact on the length of time taken to reach slaughter weight
• The delay is associated with an increase in associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
• The size of this effect varies considerably across cattle breeds and individual producers

Questions

Solutions

This project is using of individual-level data to provide a unique perspective on veterinary medicine usage and its costs and benefits in beef and dairy farming. It is informing treatment guidelines and, along with new on-farm technologies, helping form the basis of a new individual-based method for monitoring animal health and performance.

Identify patterns of veterinary medicine usage

We are using Moredun farmer member data to provide simple descriptive analyses of which treatments are used most often for a given disorder and whether the treatments prescribed vary depending on variables such as animal age or type of holding. More complex analyses will include the determination of usage patterns across the year: for example, how the timing of flukicide applications with different active ingredients and activity against different fluke life stages correspond to the expected stages of the fluke life cycle. We are also determining if different types of producers can be grouped by treatment regimens.

Quantifying associations between veterinary medicine usage and on-farm performance

We are identifying how health events through life cumulatively influenced overall performance. Our analysis assesses variation in animal performance, with animal identity as a random effect, treatments as the main fixed effects of interest, and confounding variables including farm-level effects and animal-level effects including sex, age, and breed.

Determining associations between veterinary medicine usage and abattoir performance

This analysis is exploring the links between diseases reported on-farm and/or at slaughter on measures of beef cattle performance, including but not limited to growth rate, the ability of an animal to make it off-farm, and carcass parameters. The outcome of this work is determining the health parameters and medicines that are most strongly associated with animal performance

Potential benefits of the project include:

• An evaluation of adherence to best-practice guidelines for veterinary medicine usage, and potential improvements to these guidelines including using appropriate treatments for the right reasons and at the right time
• Quantification of the costs and benefits of specific treatments for specific diseases, in terms of the financial costs associated with treatments and the impact on animal performance
• Evaluation of the importance of timing of treatment for its efficacy
• Analysis of the pathologies or syndromes that lead to cattle failing to make it off-farm and to slaughter

Project Partners

Progress