Traditional mixed livestock cereal- and pasture-based sheep farming systems in Europe are threatened by intensification and specialisation processes. However, the intensification process does not always yield improved economic results or efficiency. This study involved a group of farmers that raised an autochthonous sheep breed (Ojinegra de Teruel) in an unfavourable area of North-East Spain. T...

Mastitis in bovine is an important disease in milk herds that cause economical losses due to decrease of milk production and treatment costs. Somatic cell count (SCC) is one of traditional test in mastitis diagnosis. The aim of current study was to evaluate the accuracy of udder check (on-farm) in comparison to SCC in industrial livestock. Current study was conducted in a 100 bovine livestock, ...

The availability of epidemiological data in the early stages of an outbreak of an infectious disease is vital for modelers to make accurate predictions regarding the likely spread of disease and preferred intervention strategies. However, in some countries, the necessary demographic data are only available at an aggregate scale. We investigated the ability of models of livestock infectious dise...

The aim of the article is to evaluate production efficiency and its determinants of specialised dairy farming among the EU regions. In the most of European regions, there is a relatively high significance of small specialised farms including dairy farms. The DEAVRS method (data envelopment analysis with variable returns to scale) reveals efficient and inefficient regions including the scale eff...

Schemes for the assessment of farm animal welfare and assurance of welfare standards have proliferated in recent years. An acknowledged short-coming has been the lack of impact of these schemes on the welfare standards achieved on farm due in part to sociological factors concerning their implementation. Here we propose the concept of welfare performance based on a broad set of performance attri...

The Extension Service, United States Department of Agriculture, funded a special project to approach development of extension materials for dairy farmers by systems analysis. Agricultural engineers created video tapes and publications on manure, feed handling, calf housing, and milking subsystems. Dairy scientists created slide-tapes and publications on controlling feed losses during harvest, s...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of livestock production systems is often based on inventory data for farms typical of a study region. As information on individual animals is often unavailable, livestock data may already be aggregated at the time of inventory analysis, both across individual animals and across seasons. Even though various computational tools exist to consider the effect of genetic a...

“Livestock waste” means livestock manure, unconsumed feed and associated bedding materials or litter animal carcasses from normal mortalities of on a farm. Waste management includes the activities actions required to manage waste its inception final disposal. Livestock wastes if not properly it may lead fecal contamination waters receiving agricultural runoff. The danger humans lies in possibil...

Survey results describing the levels and prevalences of zoonotic agents in 1,549 livestock waste samples were analyzed for significance with livestock husbandry and farm waste management practices. Statistical analyses of survey data showed that livestock groups containing calves of <3 months of age, piglets, or lambs had higher prevalences and levels of Campylobacter spp. and Escherichia coli ...