| dc.description.abstract | In the future veterinary herd health management (VHHM) is becoming a more and more important part to secure a responsible dairy production. However, there is room for improvement. By giving VHHM a more fixed structure and by following prewritten steps like goal setting, planning, execution and evaluation, the veterinarian and other advisors are able to tailor VHHM to the farm. This emphasizes that the execution of VHHM is changing over the years. If you can divide dairy farmers into different groups based on their interests, veterinarians are better able to target the topics that this specific farmer is interested in. This was done in a previous study.
The purpose of this study is to make a cross validation of the previous study and the consequent derived (group) results. Also, we tried to create some depth and discover the reasons why farmers do or do not want to discuss a certain topic.
For this study, which is a cross-validation of the previous study, nineteen randomly selected farmers were approached and were personally interviewed with an open-question interview. This interview was divided into three parts; the general data, general questions about farm(ers) data and questions about VHHM.
Based on the interviews, we could draw three main conclusions:
The list of topics (claw health, nutrition, young stock rearing, fertility management, udder health, housing and analysis of production numbers and milk quality), which was studied before, is nowadays still useful, but can be complemented with topics that are recent developments in the sector. Obtaining the relative importance of different topics is not very useful in practice.
Because nineteen interviewed farmers all gave a different definition of VHHM, the second thing that can be concluded is that there is not a clear definition of VHHM among farmers.
To avoid incomprehension and discontent among farmers and their advisors, it is important to be aware of each other’s understandings about VHHM.
And the last conclusion is; personal characteristics from both farmer and advisor, can prevent VHHM from being fully utilized if there is a mismatch between those two. This could result in dissatisfied farmers which can possibly lead to, for example, a reduced frequency of asking VHHM and executing it.
Overall, the conclusion from the cross-validation is that the results from the previous study are probably not very useful in practice. Because the method which was used, the closed-questioned survey, came with a certain limitation and so could not take into account the personal characteristics of the farmers and was not able to create depth in the answers, thus being unable to trace the underlying reasons for the farmers’ answers.
In this study, with these results, it is not possible to make a useful farmers profile. The only thing that certainly can be concluded is that VHHM is very personal, both for farmers and advisors. Therefore, good collaboration and communication between these two is the only way to perform VHHM at the most useful way. | |
