If I look back over 38 years working as a farm vet, there is one lasting memory that stands out. The vets who make the best progress and enjoy their work, have a great relationship with the farmers. What defined them was their ability to engage and motivate the farmers to do the right thing to improve animal health. Those vets didn’t necessarily know the most, but they had the most impact on herd health on farm.
For the last 25 years I have worked on tackling Johne’s Disease (JD) within my practice but also as a consultant vet on farm and within the Johne’s Action Group. I have ended up as the UK rapporteur for the disease at the International Dairy Forum, Chair of the Technical group AGJ, Board member of the International Association of Paratuberculosis and I developed the first online system for managing JD within Myhealthyherd in 2009. I have produced countless papers on JD and worked with so many vets and farmers to spread the word. I have absolutely no idea how that all happened! I have no additional post-graduate qualifications in cattle medicine or Johne’s Disease. I am just a practising vet.
On reflection though, there are some characteristics and approaches that have helped me along the way. Four things stand out:
Networking well with experts
“Standing on the shoulders of giants allows you to see further.” There are so many people out there that know so much and are always willing to help and share their knowledge. Expertise often gets trapped and is poorly disseminated.
Passion and interest
My first major experience with JD came in the nineties, when one of our farmers bought 200 Danish heifers into an estate herd split over six herds. The heifers developed lungworm when they were buffer fed outside in the summer. Coprophagia and a naive immune system is a great way to spread a disease. These heifers went on to spread JD amongst the herds. This experience really developed my passion and interest in how JD could be managed better in the UK.
Communication
The ability to communicate clearly in a way that the person receiving it wants to hear. Photographs, images and high-energy pitches were my mainstay in the early years. This has now shifted with age more towards a listening, consultative, coaching, ‘servant style’ leadership approach, where I am comfortable being subordinate in the decision making process.
Thinking laterally
Or perhaps that just means more creatively or deeply. If you consider all the options out there and don’t just stick to dogma or common belief, you can make greater progress. That can be the real problem with Evidenced Based Medicine – it can fix science in the past rather than the future.
All that vets knew about JD control, back in the day, was ‘Test and cull’. That was where the evidence pointed. This was a system that worked well in small beef herds where the R value for disease spread was inherently low (high resilience, lower risk of spread), but this method just didn’t work in larger dairy herds with high prevalence. Another approach had to be adopted.
I worked with Dick Sibley to develop the six control strategies for JD within Myhealthyherd and subsequently the National Johne’s Management Plan. This would allow all farmers to participate with JD control irrespective of their aspiration, resources or prevalence. The NJMP has become the envy of all: “The social science will provide the answers for future success.” (Morrison et al 2024) “We have a fully commercial system that effectively controls JD, that works.” (Taylor et al 2024)
So, is there a better way?
On a bad day when you come home tired, cold, covered in cow faeces and smelling of something that has crawled out of a refuse bin, you do wonder whether you made the right choice being a farm vet. Where is the interest?
Farmer relationships are what hangs it all together. The clinical work per se is not enough to enthuse you. You must enjoy the journey: the ability to motivate and help your farmer clients get better and to see the herd improve.
Over my lifetime I have seen huge improvements in animal welfare on farm. The easy diseases were all tackled by applying good tests and simple treatments/vaccines (brucellosis, leptospirosis etc). We are now left with the ruck of really tough disease syndromes to treat (endemic disease syndromes, TB, JD). There are no quick fixes and the route to success is in persuading the farmer to do more to reduce the R value and reduce the prevalence.
So how can we do this? Is there a method? What works best?
If you read all the social science papers, the central plank of success with farmer engagement is the quality of the vet : farmer relationship. If that is not there, then progress will be limited. The foundations of the relationship centre on a pyramid of factors.
You must show passion and genuine interest in the farmer and his life. Only through building understanding and trust can you make progress. Listening is more important than talking or knowing stuff. If you are ever stuck, ask a question. Present the farmer with problems and develop a shared solution rather than try and be the expert all the time. If you provide solutions the farmer will find problems with them and seldom apply your plan!
“If you give a farmer a problem, he/she will find a solution. If you give the farmer a solution, he/she will find problems with it.”
– Dick Sibley
Positive interactions and body language are so important. Don’t just talk negatively about disease. Use dynamic body language that enthuses (and never fold your arms to keep warm!) Celebrate achievements and focus on what has gone well rather than just point out the failures every time you visit. Farmers are happy to pay for you to motivate the team and less enthusiastic to remunerate you to make them feel bad about what they have not done. If you don’t feel the farmer has taken the right approach, it’s much better to translate this into “Great that you have done this… Even better if…” conversations. I always sought to make the farmer laugh, or at least enjoy the vet visit. Life’s just too short for 100 per cent intensity and conversations about failure! Encouraging marginal gains and behaviour changes is vital for progress. (Higgins 2012)
Bring positive energy to the farmer’s day rather than worries and despondency. This reinforces positive change. You don’t have to be the expert all the time. Just be ‘human’ and seek to develop that great professional relationship. Trust, confidence and competence then builds on the solid foundations of the relationship. Your knowledge base will expand exponentially once you listen more effectively to your clients. You will be that ‘good vet’ in the client’s eyes and that’s ultimately what matters. The same approach works brilliantly with your colleagues too.
The systematic approach of farmer engagement is the next step. You need to build upon this relationship to achieve behaviour change in the farmer. I have summarised this using JD as an example (Orpin and Sibley 2024), (Grant et al 2023). In a study based on farmers’ approaches to biosecurity, the researchers revealed five interconnecting themes which focused on issues of trust, time, getting to know each other, the ability to have cooperative discussions and clarification regarding the cost-effectiveness of measures. A key conclusion of this study was that the vet : farmer relationship, and potentially how these interactions occur, are likely to be critical to any future disease prevention planning and implementation efforts.
No amount of testing will solve mastitis, TB or JD. We must find ways to engage farmers with adopting solutions based on shared discussions.
Taking a non-judgemental approach to our farmer relationships is so important too. Judgement prevents progress. Often the farmer is blamed for his circumstances and the disease levels within his herd. Often however, what is wrong within these herds is down to our approach and the communication methods. Frequently they are based on the methods we have successfully used with other proactive farmers, who have differing learning styles, understanding or beliefs, or attribute different importance to a particular disease. ‘We must meet people where they stand’ and seek to understand rather than judge or write off.
Summary
We spend five years at university learning how not to engage with farmers! We typically fall into the trap of believing that we must be the expert and getting hooked up on the details of technical knowledge and hard evidence. We don’t! We just must listen more, understand what motivates our farmers, take a more relaxed relationship-based approach to our work. Our own self-doubt holds us back too often.
In my opinion, based largely on observation and literature, the real step forward for farm practice and improving animal health and welfare will lie in engaging with the social science and improving farmer engagement. It’s never too late to learn.
References
Grant, N., Buchanan, H. & Brennan, M. L., 2023. Factors within A Veterinarian-Cattle Farmer Relationship That May Impact on Biosecurity Being Carried out on Farms: An Exploratory Study. Veterinary Science , 10(7).p410.
Higgins, H., Green, M. J., & Madouasse, A. (2012b). Facilitating change in herd health.. Dairy Herd Health, 11-33. https://doi.org/10.1079/9781845939977.0011
Morrison R, Hanks J, Orpin PG, Strain S, Taylor EN, Rose DC. Challenges for the management of Johne’s disease in the UK: Expectation management, space, ‘free riding’, and vet-farmer communication. Prev Vet Med. 2024 Jul 22;231:106295. doi: 10.1016/j.prevetmed.2024.106295. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 39116763.
Taylor EN, Channa K, Orpin PG, Hanks J, Taylor NM. Changes in the Johne’s disease situation in GB dairy herds over 10 years, as revealed by regular milk ELISA data. Prev Vet Med. 2024 Aug 21;232:106317. doi: 10.1016/j.prevetmed.2024.106317. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 39178523.
Orpin PG, Sibley R.J (2024) Practical tips to engage farmers with Johne’s Disease control in dairy herds. Livestock. In press
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