Health Advisors in Organic Meet Sheep Farms: The Role of the Veterinarians

Abstract

Farmers receive advice from various categories of advisors' regarding the health management of their flocks. With respect to disease control strategies, treatment recommendations typically include either an allopathic synthetic drug approach or a more organic complementary line using alternative medicine, or indeed, a combination of the two. This study aimed to determine the proportion of treatment options in use by farmers and to correlate the treatment recommendations to the different categories of health advisor. A set of 34 meat sheep farms from the centre of France was used in the restricted sampling study, this included a representative sample of both organic (n = 7) and conventional (n = 8) farms. Data on general health matters (e.g. cost of drugs, flock mortalities etc.) were collected from each of the farms. The study found conventional farms prescribed more to the recommendations made by veterinarians and spent more on synthetic allopathic drugs. The reverse situation was observed in organic farms which invested more money in alternative medicines as advised by mostly non-veterinarian health advisors, or guided by their own appreciation of disease management.