Veterinary advocacy and advice: promoting farmer resilience with evidence-based decisions

With increasing awareness around environmental challenges that can result from farming animals, changes in the way we produce food from livestock are necessary to increase efficiency and mitigate environmental impact. A common way to describe challenges faced by farmers is to talk about sustainability. This is driven by helping farmers produce food from animals efficiently; making sure food is safe for human consumption; caring for the environment by protecting resources; and safeguarding animal health and welfare. Consumer affordability versus farmer profitability is another challenge faced by farmers. One that is regularly beyond their control, often dictated instead by market value, regulatory requirements or availability of imported products, perhaps produced more cheaply and under lesser standards.

Farmers face so many challenges and do not know where their next challenge will come from. At times, the sustainability concept can appear as if we have got things wrong in the past and are doing things retrospectively to put that right. That is not to lessen this important agenda, but to look at how sustainability can be developed further to support the concept that ethical and sustainable food is produced from creating resilient animals and resilient farms.