How monitoring systems are used by farmers and advisors for a better control of animal health management ?

International audience

anglais. Different approaches to manage health exist in all animal production sectors, but they are not often widely shared between them. "UniFilAnim Santé" is a collaborative project concerning different animal production sectors (poultry, pigs and ruminants) that aims to help farmers to improve animal health management by drawing inspiration from different monitoring systems applied in other sectors. First, a questionnaire was sent to farmer’s advisors (veterinarians, technicians, dairy controllers….) to detail any tools or steps used on farms to improve animal health management. From the 178 responses collected, a typology of all these tools/steps allowed us to distinguish five groups: mandatory tools, tools related to the creation of benchmarks, tools based on slaughterhouse data and analytical laboratory results, tools related to farmer’s discussion groups, and finally tools to be specifically set up on farm by the farmer, alone or with an advisor. Then, 12farmers and/or advisors focus-groups for the different production fields were conducted (i) to test this typology, (ii) to identify tools they are using or that they could use to monitor the health of their animals and (iii) to classify them in one of the predefined groups. After a qualitative analysis, the results for the different animal production sectors show a discrepancy between the tools used by farmers and those used by advisors. Advisors are using rather tracking tools that are forward-looking, expensive and quite sophisticated. Farmers are mainly using "sensitive" indicators (smell, sight, etc.) on a daily basis. DIfferent actors (farmers and/or advisors) regret, whatever the production field, the lack of inter-operability between their tools and sometimes the lack of data valorization. There is a distribution of roles and tools between farmers and advisors opposing a daily health management operated by farmers to a medium-term surveillance of livestock health provided by advisors. Each sector is distinguished by the partnership scheme that the farmer builds around the farm health surveillance, and by the nature of the contract which binds him/her to economic operators: cattle and pig farmers are more involved in the management of their farm and their animals, whereas in the poultry sector (that is more integrated), it is mainly coordinated by the advisors of the poultry industry organization