Communication in animal health and welfare planning

Summary

The project ‘Minimising medicine use in organic dairy herds through animal health and welfare promotion’ is focused on animal welfare assessment and its role in the active use of animal health plans in order to improve animal health and welfare on organic farms. To be active, a health plan requires dialogue between the farmer and those who are able to view the farm from the outside e.g. vets and advisors. The importance of this communication is the focus of this paper.
Across Europe we see highly diverse farming systems and similarly diversity in advisory systems and their approaches to communicating with farmers. One of the objectives of the AniPlan project is to develop approaches to health planning that are robust yet sufficiently adaptable to be applied across these various conditions. This will involve utilising knowledge of current approaches to communication between farmer and advisor, but also the opportunity for new ways of communication that contribute to the process of animal health and welfare promotion. Relevance to the farmer is paramount.
In this paper, three current approaches are summarised, focusing on the dialogue between farmer and ‘external persons’. These are the Danish Stable Schools, the Dutch farmer study groups (where farmers participate in doing animal welfare assessment in a fellow-farmer’s herd) and the Swiss pro-Q project, where there is a very active dialogue between advisors and farmers in a continuous feed-back system. Further to these descriptions, the paper summarises the results of discussions between participants at the first AniPlan workshop in Hellevad, Denmark on the subject of communication in the animal health planning process.