Farmers' Uptake of Animal Health and Welfare Technological Innovations. Implications for Animal Health Policies.

Jiayi Liu,Andrew P Barnes,Alistair Stott,Luiza Toma

doi:10.3389/fvets.2019.00410

Jiayi Liu, Andrew P Barnes + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2019.00410

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Abstract

The paper analyses the uptake of animal health and welfare technologies by livestock farmers focusing on the identification of different behavioral patterns occurring in subpopulations of farmers and the assessment of the effect socio-economic and attitudinal factors have on these patterns. The technologies of interest include new genomic technologies, animal electronic identification (EID) for farm management, cattle surveillance, welfare qualitative behavioral assessment, anaerobic digestion, pedometers or activity monitors to detect oestrus and increase fertility/conception, and webcams/smart phones/tablets for animal husbandry. We use latent class analysis modeling and cross-section survey data to construct typologies of farmers based on technological uptake and heterogeneous characteristics. Our results suggest that, while three fifths of the farmers are “non-adopters,” a third is classified as “current adopters” of animal EID for farm management, and a twelfth as “future adopters” of either or more types of animal health and welfare technologies. Age, agricultural income, perceived difficulty to invest in new technologies, agri-environmental scheme membership, and frequency of access to information on animal EID for farm management and cattle surveillance through British Cattle Movement Service, are significant predictors of typology membership. The findings are policy relevant as they give quantitative evidence on the factors influencing technological uptake and, as such, help identify the most likely adopters and optimize the cost of targeting them. As information access was found to be among the factors influencing multiple technology adoption, policy instruments should include the provision of training as regards the implementation of technologies and their combined impact on farm. Farmers' adoption of interrelated innovations suggests the need to coordinate individual policies aimed at encouraging uptake of different technologies. As shown here, this would concern not only synchronizing animal health and welfare policies, but also their interaction with others such as agri-environmental ones. Moreover, the results show that animal health policies requiring regulatory compliance may lead to voluntary uptake of additional or complementary technologies which relate to not just meeting but exceeding standards of animal welfare and health practices.

Highlights

Farming populations within most countries tend to exhibit a range of goals and farming objectives, reflecting productionorientation and embedding of social values [1,2,3,4]
In Europe, these changing policy signals are embodied in the reform documents of the Common Agricultural Policy and related regulations and support focused on socially desirable consequences such as protection and enhancement of animal health, welfare and the environment [4]
The analysis followed two stages: firstly, it identified the possible number of latent classes from various LC classification models based on technological innovation adoption and intentions to adopt

Summary

Introduction

Farming populations within most countries tend to exhibit a range of goals and farming objectives, reflecting productionorientation and embedding of social values [1,2,3,4]. This makes LCA the appropriate tool for answering the purpose of this study of identifying typologies of Scottish farmers based on health and welfare technological adoption, and estimating the effect of variables such as socio-economic characteristics to predict the latent class membership.

Results

Conclusion