Herd Health

What is Herd Health? Are routine vet visits beneficial for my herd?

As livestock producers and vets alike, we all too often address clinical disease on an individual, case-by-case basis, waiting for problems to arise before we tackle them. The concept of herd health moves away from individual animal issues and looks more towards the herd as a whole, aiming to preempt clinical problems, recognize subclinical disease and thus reduce the number of clinical cases arising. Whilst there is no way we can eliminate all individual problems from our work load, there is definitely opportunity to help reduce both clinical and, sometimes more importantly, subclinical disease within a herd. Reduction in disease levels results in increased income and reduced economic losses.

Herd health is largely implemented via routine farm veterinary visits. These allow identification of disease risks and application of risk management. Individually tailored advisory/intervention plans and monitoring activities are put in place and followed on a routine basis. Visit frequency might vary from weekly to fortnightly or even monthly/bi-monthly and will be dependent on the individual farm and season.

If you feel your herd can benefit from routine visits and/or a herd health plan, feel free to contact the clinic for more information.