Danish dairy farmers' perception of biosecurity.

To implement biosecurity measures at farm-level is a motivational challenge to dairy farmers as emerging diseases and their consequences largely are unpredictable. One of the reasons for this challenge is that outcomes are more likely to benefit society than the individual farmer. From the individual farmer's point of view the impacts of zoonotic risk, international trade and welfare concerns appear less obvious than the direct costs at farm-level. Consequently, a social dilemma may arise where collective interests are at odds with private interests. To improve biosecurity at farm-level farmers must be motivated to change behavior in the 'right' direction which could provide selfish farmers with unintended possibilities to exploit the level of biosecurity provided by other dairy farmers' collective actions. Farmers' perception of risk of disease introduction into a dairy herd was explored by means of Q-methodology. Participating farmers owned very large dairy herds and were selected for this study because Danish legislation since 2008 has required that larger farms develop and implement a farm specific biosecurity plan. However, a year from introduction of this requirement, none of the participating farmers had developed a biosecurity plan. Farmers' perception of biosecurity could meaningfully be described by four families of perspectives, labeled: cooperatives; confused; defectors, and introvert. Interestingly, all families of perspectives agreed that sourcing of animals from established dealers represented the highest risk to biosecurity at farm-level. Farmers and policy-makers are faced with important questions about biosecurity at farm-level related to the sanctioning system within the contextual framework of social dilemmas. To solve these challenges we propose the development of a market-mediated system to (1) reduce the risk of free-riders, and (2) provide farmers with incentives to improve biosecurity at farm-level.

A mixed methods inquiry: How dairy farmers perceive the value(s) of their involvement in an intensive dairy herd health management program.

BACKGROUND: Research has been scarce when it comes to the motivational and behavioral sides of farmers' expectations related to dairy herd health management programs. The objectives of this study were to explore farmers' expectations related to participation in a health management program by: 1) identifying important ambitions, goals and subjective well-being among farmers, 2) submitting those data to a quantitative analysis thereby characterizing perspective(s) of value added by health management programs among farmers; and 3) to characterize perceptions of farmers' goals among veterinarians. METHODS: The subject was initially explored by means of literature, interviews and discussions with farmers, herd health management consultants and researchers to provide an understanding (a concourse) of the research entity. The concourse was then broken down into 46 statements. Sixteen Danish dairy farmers and 18 veterinarians associated with one large nationwide veterinary practice were asked to rank the 46 statements that defined the concourse. Next, a principal component analysis was applied to identify correlated statements and thus families of perspectives between respondents. Q-methodology was utilized to represent each of the statements by one row and each respondent by one column in the matrix. A subset of the farmers participated in a series of semi-structured interviews to face validate the concourse and to discuss subjects like animal welfare, veterinarians' competences as experienced by the farmers and time constraints in the farmers' everyday life. RESULTS: Farmers' views could be described by four families of perspectives: Teamwork, Animal welfare, Knowledge dissemination, and Production. Veterinarians believed that farmers' primary focus was on production and profit, however, farmers' valued teamwork and animal welfare more. CONCLUSION: The veterinarians in this study appear to focus too much on financial performance and increased production when compared to most of the participating farmers' expectations. On the other hand veterinarians did not focus enough on the major products, which farmers really wanted to buy, i.e. teamwork and animal welfare. Consequently, disciplines like sociology, economics and marketing may offer new methodological approaches to veterinarians as these disciplines have understood that accounting for individual differences is central to motivate change, i.e. 'know thy customer'.

A mixed methods inquiry into the validity of data.

BACKGROUND: Research in herd health management solely using a quantitative approach may present major challenges to the interpretation of the results, because the humans involved may have responded to their observations based on previous experiences and own beliefs. This challenge can be met through increased awareness and dialogue between researchers and farmers or other stakeholders about the background for data collection related to management and changes in management. By integrating quantitative and qualitative research methods in a mixed methods research approach, the researchers will improve their understanding of this potential bias of the observed data and farms, which will enable them to obtain more useful results of quantitative analyses. CASE DESCRIPTION: An example is used to illustrate the potentials of combining quantitative and qualitative approaches to herd health related data analyses. The example is based on two studies on bovine metritis. The first study was a quantitative observational study of risk factors for metritis in Danish dairy cows based on data from the Danish Cattle Database. The other study was a semi-structured interview study involving 20 practicing veterinarians with the aim to gain insight into veterinarians' decision making when collecting and processing data related to metritis. DISCUSSION AND EVALUATION: The relations between risk factors and metritis in the first project supported the findings in several other quantitative observational studies; however, the herd incidence risk was highly skewed. There may be simple practical reasons for this, e.g. underreporting and differences in the veterinarians' decision making. Additionally, the interviews in the second project identified several problems with correctness and validity of data regarding the occurrence of metritis because of differences regarding case definitions and thresholds for treatments between veterinarians. CONCLUSION: Studies where associations between specific herd health management routines and disease outcome variables are drawn based purely on quantitative observational studies may benefit greatly by adding a qualitative perspective to the quantitative approach as illustrated and discussed in this article. The combined approach requires, besides skills and interdisciplinary collaboration, also openness, reflection and scepticism from the involved scientists, but the benefits may be extended to various contexts both in advisory service and science.