Abstract
Traditionally, technical guidance aiming at the improvement of the farm productivity has mainly been done, from the local veterinary officers or clinical veterinarians to the farmers. Despite of such efforts, so called one-way guidance sometimes, a large number of farms have not achieved the expected goal yet. Given this situation, this case report describes a trial that adopted the more interactive methodology ‘dialog’ between a farmer and author to drive the good control measure of bovine leukemia focusing on the appropriate colostrum feeding, which is considered to be difficult to conduct in particular.
The dialog consisted of questioning form the author and answering by the famer and questions asked included : what bovine leukemia and its agent are, if the farmer has any problems on it or not, his future plans and so on. The farmer was facilitated to think of each answer by himself with some assistance of veterinary knowledge if needed, and finally, the author asked about the best measure as the farmer’s own practice.
Based on this experience, this methodology is applied to other farmers and they started the feasible and effective colostrum feeding. Among these farmers, the homemade colostrum heating apparatus was prepared in one farm. And this farm successfully decreased the bovine leukemia seroprevalence of young heifers (six to twelve month old) from 36% to zero, and then all the heifers from that farm are now accepted to the common grazing farms.
Questioning makes the farmers think of the solution by themselves. And this is based on the principle called participatory approach. Farmers are expected to have the more proactive determination. In this point of view, veterinarians are recommended to support, not supervise, their decision making process on the animal health unless it is legislation issues.
To improve the farm productivity, farmers should act on their own initiative. And, veterinarians need to incorporate the various approaches as well as conventional supervising methods and try to make the farmers have the further subjective motivation, which is expected to lead to the more refined farm management and further promotion of the livestock industry in consequence.
