Keeping Your Herd Healthy

Know components of a healthy herd and learn to manage health problems in your livestock before experiencing loss in production.

By Ryan Ridgway
Updated on July 8, 2022
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by Joseph Stanski

Know the components of a healthy herd and learn to manage health problems in your livestock before experiencing loss in production.

Herd health is top priority when raising livestock, but its impact could go unnoticed by the untrained eye. Herd health displays not only in the number of sick or injured animals, but also in your animals’ welfare and productivity on the whole. Many producers don’t realize that their animals are fighting off an underlying disease that is costing them money. Ailments can be hard to spot without monitoring feed intake and production numbers. In short, some might assume that if they don’t see any visible signs of sickness, their animals are healthy.

When your farm has a disease outbreak, there are two groups affected: a small number of the sick ones, and the rest that are fighting off the disease but may not be showing any signs. Those seemingly healthy animals are paying a price just like those more obviously afflicted. It’s like an iceberg, and the majority of your production losses are invisible under the water, because it is a decrease in milk, eggs, fiber growth, or weight gain.

Dairy producers who monitor milk production on a daily basis are well aware of the impact of subclinical diseases. They can tune into a disease outbreak before any visible signs of sickness appear because they’re aware of any drop in milk production. This production loss is due to the fact that the immune system requires large amounts of energy to fight off illness, and animals tend to eat less when they don’t feel well. Boosting your herd’s immunity is the most important part of maximizing your herd’s production and welfare.

Components of health

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