Udder health management improvement: Insights from agent-based modelling

Food processors and governments aim to motivate dairy farmers to improve udder health management. Such farmers’ decisions are driven not only by economic considerations, but also by other motivations, cognitions and professional and personal networks. Little is known about integrated influence of such aspects on adoption of improved udder health management. The effect of these aspects on success of the current tools used to motivate farmers to improve udder health is also unknown. An agent-based model that simulates the simultaneous decisions to adopt udder health measures of multiple heterogeneous dairy farmers (agents) interacting with each other has been developed. The model reveals emerging macro-level patterns of system behaviour, when individual behaviour of each farmer is defined by economic considerations, cognitions and farmers’ networks. The collective behaviour is presented by the total number of farmers adopting certain udder health improvement measures over time. The integrated analysis of farmers’ behaviour with regard to adoption of udder health measures indicates that stimulation of adoption of different measures require different approaches to designs of incentive system and communication campaigns. Intensive communication campaigns seem to be better designed per individual measure, since intensive communication might be not needed for all the measures available. For the measures, adoption of which could be more difficult due to extra expenditures involved, communication campaign and interacting with other farmers alone are not very effective. Stimulation of adoption of such measures requires putting an economic incentive system in place. Farmers’ personal motivation and network are also shown to reinforce the adoption of udder health; though network is really effective only for low motivated farmers.