Dairy study to detail sector's key health and production matters

Friday, March 21, 2014

by SUSAN MANN

For the first time ever, the Canadian dairy industry is embarking on a massive study detailing the sector’s most important health and production matters.

David Kelton of the University of Guelph’s department of population medicine says it will be similar to the U.S. National Animal Health Monitoring System studies done once every seven years in each of the major animal commodities. The National Animal Health Monitoring System, part of the United States Department of Agriculture, is doing its dairy study this year.

Many Canadian researchers and industry representatives use numbers from the U.S. studies “as benchmarks for our industries,” says Kelton, the lead investigator on the Canadian dairy study.  “We’ve never done anything quite like this in Canada but we’ve done a lot of regional studies.”

The closest “thing we’ve done to a national study was through the Bovine Mastitis Research Network,” he says, noting “we had a bunch of herds from across the country that were contributing data to a national study on mastitis.” That study was done about five years ago.

Canadian researchers will use the same methodology used by the National Animal Health Monitoring System “so we can actually do some North American comparisons,” he says.

The national dairy study is one of 14 different research projects that are part of the dairy research cluster, which is jointly funded by Dairy Farmers of Canada and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

Kelton says the Canadian study begins this year with an on-line, 15-minute needs assessment survey for farmers, dairy producer organizations, processors, provincial and federal dairy health and production staff members to outline what they consider to be the major issues for farmers and people working in the industry. The needs assessment survey is available until May 1.

The actual survey begins in 2015. Researchers will select a random sample of dairy farmers from across Canada and use a variety of data-gathering methods, including questionnaires, interviews, and at least one farm visit to collect samples from animals and the environment. About 500 to 1,000 farms across the country will be needed for the survey but Kelton says the number depends on “what the questions are and how many (farmers) we need to get a statistically significant sample.”

The primary work for the study will be done in 2015 and then it will take at least a year after that to get the samples tested. “Realistically it will be 2016 before we get a lot of the information out of the study,” Kelton says. BF