Planning for better animal health and welfare, Report from the 1st ANIPLAN project workshop, Hellevad, October 2007

Summary

’Minimising medicine use in organic dairy herds through animal health and welfare planning’, ANIPLAN, is a CORE-Organic project which was initiated in June 2007. The main aim of the project is to investigate active and well planned animal health and welfare promotion and disease prevention as a means of minimising medicine use in organic dairy herds. This aim will be met through the development of animal health and welfare planning principles for organic dairy farms under diverse conditions based on an evaluation of current experiences. This also includes application of animal health and welfare assessment across Europe. In order to bring this into practice the project also aims at developing guidelines for communication about animal health and welfare promotion in different settings, for example, as part of existing animal health advisory services or farmer groups such as the Danish Stable School system and the Dutch network programme. The project is divided into the following five work packages, four of which comprise research activities with the other focused on coordination and knowledge transfer, through meetings, workshops and publications. These proceedings represent our first results in terms of presented papers and discussions at our first project workshop in Hellevad Vandmølle as well as a review of Animal Health Planning in UK.
The content of the workshop proceedings reflect the aim and starting points of all work packages, both in terms of analyses prior to the workshop, and developments during the workshop emanating from group work. Besides a general introduction to the project and the ideas of the project, Christoph Winckler provides an overview of the use of animal based parameters based on the results of the WelfareQuality project. Christopher Atkinson and Madeleine Neale presented concepts, principles and the practicalities of Animal Health Planning and Animal Health Plans based on UK experiences. Pip Nicholas from The University of Wales, Aberystwyth produced a report reviewing the current use of animal health and welfare planning. The entire document is included in these workshop proceedings. This was supplemented through presentations from all countries regarding animal health and welfare planning processes and research. These are summarised together with the concepts developed through dialogue at the workshop in the paper by Nicholas, Vaarst and Roderick. Finally, the Danish Stable School principles were presented by Mette Vaarst followed by discussion on different approaches of communication in farmer groups and at the individual level between farmers and advisors.
One important outcome from this workshop is a set of preliminary principles for a good health planning process. We concluded through group discussions followed by a plenary session that a health planning process should aim at continuous development and improvement, and should incorporate health promotion and disease handling, based on a strategy where the current situation is evaluated and form basis for action, which is then reviewed in a new evaluation. It is important that any health plan is farm specific and based on farmer ownership, although an external person(s) should be involved, as well as external knowledge. The organic principles should form the framework for any action (meaning that a systems approach is needed), and the plan should be written. The good and positive aspects on each farm – things that other farmers potentially can learn from. The work and studies in dairy farms within the project will be based on these principles and comprise evaluation and review using animal based parameters as well as finding ways of communication with farmers about animal health and welfare.