Preventive Medicine and Infertility in Herd Health Programs

Abstract

In a previous paper I dealt with what appear to be the important areas of change in what the cattle farmer wants from his veterinary adviser, and what the implications are likely to be for the future of the bovine practitioner. The principal areas of change which I foreshadowed, and which I now propose to dissect in terms of infertility, were:

(I) In commercial herds a decrease in single treatments of sick cows, at least by practicing veterinarians.

(II) Much greater activity in providing analyses of the farm's production performance. It will then be· possible to diagnose that a farm is producing inefficiently, and to locate the area in which it is occurring. Is it nutrition, a labor problem, or is it disease? And having determined that it is disease, to identify it.

(III) When the problem falls into our area of competence, disease, the objective will be to restrain the prevalence of the disease to a predetermined level.