Data on some disease determinants can be collated without requiring additional specific on-farm data collection activities, since it has already been collected for some other purpose.
Few research studies have attempted to identify and quantify the effectiveness of biosecurity against disease introduction or presence in cattle farms and, when done, they have relied on the collection of on-farm data.
Data on environmental, animal movement, demographic/husbandry systems and density disease determinants can be collated without requiring additional specific on-farm data collection activities, since they have already been collected for some other purposes.
The potential welfare indicators were calculated for the period from January to December 2005, i.e. over the same period of time as the on-farm data were collected, for the 55 farms with complete records.
The aim of this study was to classify cattle herds according to their risk of disease presence as a proxy for compromised biosecurity in the cattle population of Wales based on readily available data not requiring on-farm data collection, as part of a risk assessment leading towards more effective biosecurity risk management on cattle farms.
However, the most of these studies have been based on analyses of farm data rather than aggregate data (Kelly et al. 2012; Mugera 2013; Sauer and Latacz-Lohmann 2015; van der Voort et al. 2014; Zhu et al. 2012).
A very high proportion of children who lived on a farm at the time of study (currently lives on a farm) were born when their parents lived on a farm (born on a farm) and continued to live on a farm (data for those who lived on a farm during the first year of life or through age 5, or had a parent who continued to work on a farm, were also analyzed but not reported).
Its generic structure means it can be used in different regions with geographic information on the location of the field and farm, data on cropping system performance, on location factors and on policy schemes.
On farm collected data and online harvested data form an ecosystem of decision support systems for farmers.
It may be useful in the field if on-farm input data could be limited to farm-specific contact data and all other necessary parameters were already provided for selected disease examples.
