Dairy Farmers and Veterinarians' Agreement on Communication in Udder Health Consulting

Abstract

Udder health consulting is an essential aspect of mastitis control and is based on herd-specific intervention often provided by the herd veterinarian, focusing on managing the bulk tank somatic cell count. Effective communication and alignment of expectations between dairy farmers and herd veterinarians are more critical than ever due to the substantial increase in herd sizes, which amplifies both potential gains and losses. To facilitate future cooperation between dairy farmers and herd veterinarians, it is important to understand the current level of agreement in communication, and therefore, we conducted a study to describe the agreement in the perception of their communication during udder health consulting. From August 2019 to February 2021, herds (n = 88) were selected to participate in the study, with the herd size ranging from 105 to 1291 milking cows. The dairy farmer and herd veterinarian were encouraged to answer a questionnaire to shed light on their perception of communication during udder health consulting. The agreement between the dairy farmer and herd veterinarian regarding their perception of communication during udder health consulting was initially analyzed using Cohen's weighted kappa. The agreement between farmers and veterinarians ranged from -0.06 and 0.12, indicating that the herd veterinarians' focus is inconsistent with the dairy farmers' preferences. The frequency with which udder health is discussed and how potential problems are identified were associated with a significantly lower BTSCC estimate of 427 cells/mL. In contrast, general cooperation between the dairy farmer and herd veterinarian was associated with an estimated increase of 604 cells/mL in BTSCC.

Keywords: communication; consulting; dairy farmer; herd veterinarian; udder health.

Figure 1

DAG diagram illustrating the association between the herd explanatory variables (left), each of the constructs used as explanatory variables (middle), and the dependent variable (right).

Figure 2

Boxplot showing the agreement between the farmers and the herd veterinarians for each of the five constructs in the study, with dots illustrating outliners.

Figure 3

The agreement of the paired questions of the dairy farmer and herd veterinarian based on the Cohen’s weighted kappa value. The x-axis refers to the question number, and the y-axis refers to the Cohen’s weighted kappa value see Supplementary Material Table S3.