Agribusiness News December 2024 – Sector Focus: HerdPlan

Enhancing Livestock Health and Productivity through Dynamic Health Planning

Effective health planning is essential for enhancing animal health, welfare, and productivity.  This can be achieved through close collaboration with your farm team, vet and other specialist advisers.  The focus should always be on prevention rather than cure, and it should be a continuous process.

Implementing appropriate vaccination plans, husbandry, nutrition management, and robust biosecurity measures can significantly improve animal health and welfare, thereby boosting your business’s economic revenue.  However, because farm conditions can change rapidly due to staff changes, unexpected weather conditions, or sudden livestock health issues, an annual health planning meeting is insufficient.

Regular discussions—ideally 3-4 times a year—with your farm team and vet are crucial.  These meetings ensure everyone stays informed about the latest livestock health and performance data information.  During these sessions, you can set specific targets for your flock/herd, such as fertility rates, calf survival from pregnancy diagnosis to weaning, and daily weight gain.

Working proactively with your vet, you can identify potential obstacles to achieving these targets and develop plans to prevent this happening.

Regular monitoring and reviewing of your targets during the year will help you identify new risks and adjust your strategies accordingly.

This continuous and dynamic health planning process, through improved health risk management can increase farm resilience and reduce costs.

Prevention pays

By focusing on prevention, which is cheaper than treating diseases, you can improve productivity as healthy animals grow faster and produce more.

Regular checks can catch issues early, reducing deaths and helping you and your vet make data-driven, informed choices, further cutting unnecessary costs.

However, even though most of the UK farms have a health plan, the health planning process is not necessarily seen as continuous or dynamic.

Health planning It is often viewed as just another requirement to satisfy government or farm assurance schemes and other bodies such as supermarkets.  This leads to it being treated as a tick-box exercise rather than a process that can you achieve healthier and more productive livestock.

To address this, SRUC Vet Services have created a free forecasting tool called HerdPlan to help you and, your vets value your breeding herd or flock.

Herd Plan

HerdPlan generates three forecasts:

• a hypothetical optimistic “best case,”
• a hypothetical pessimistic “worst case”,
• and a custom scenario where you can adjust the parameters for your own herd or flock.

The forecasts help you to better understand the business opportunities and risks associated with livestock health.

The tool visually presents the potential financial gain from improved health, the financial risk of poor health outcomes, and the difference between the two.

By using farm-specific performance parameters and real market prices, the tool also facilitates informed decision-making on health interventions and planning activities.

Setting the health wheels in motion

To facilitate dynamic health planning, SRUC Vet Services, supported by the Scottish Government have created HerdPlan as a user-friendly, online auditable tool which helps you work with your vet on interventions, setting targets, managing diseases, biosecurity measures, and policies.

HerdPlan is designed specifically for farmers and vets to make health risk management more efficient, collaborative, and proactive and complies with farm assurance schemes like Red Tractor and QMS.

For more information on HerdPlan, or our free Forecasting tool visit HerdPlan or contact us at herdplan@sruc.ac.uk

Foteini Manolaraki, Foteini.Manolaraki@sruc.ac.uk