Applications of Production Records to Improve Herd Profitability

Abstract

Problems occurred on livestock production are related to several factors that interacted with each other, and it is difficult to quantify possible risk factors affecting to production performance. Production epidemiology is an essential tool for assessing these problems by identifying the incidence rate, relative frequency, and risk factors related to the problems using large database obtained from livestock production. Recently the livestock industry changes their standard operation procedures to improve their production efficiency and increases number of animals per farm. These changes build a large database that contains record and process of animal identifications or production event. However, an application of the database in livestock species remains under-utilized because a farmer or adviser does not have enough knowledge or time to perform epidemiological analysis. It is important to enhance our knowledge on production epidemiology to identify problem areas and improve their production in livestock production. This paper provides the concepts and the applications of production epidemiology using the production data acquired from commercial livestock operations in order to improve production efficiency.