QS: Beef fattening fully integrated from January 2023
Livestock owners and veterinarians can thus better evaluate the use of antibiotics in the company, take countermeasures more quickly if action is required and thus optimize their use.
For pig and poultry fattening farms, QS antibiotics monitoring has been practice for ten years. It is now a secure database for operational management and for the health status of the animals in the herd. Beef cattle are now another animal group that is fully integrated into the monitoring system. The aim of the QS monitoring programs is to generate added value for animal owners and veterinarians from the recorded data - which can be accessed and evaluated at any time , explains Dr. Alexander Hinrichs, Managing Director of QS Quality and Safety GmbH (QS).
We offer anonymous comparisons with other companies from the same branch of business, provide individual evaluations for critical antibiotics and, for example, also use trend analyzes to show any undesirable health developments in the stock at an early stage , says Hinrichs on the services provided by QS monitoring.
For the animal owner, the participation and assistance of the veterinarians in the QS antibiotics monitoring is important and necessary. Because the veterinarians transfer the antibiotics applications from the application and delivery receipts to the QS antibiotics database and thus provide the necessary database. The monitoring also helps the veterinarians in their day-to-day work: the comprehensive data supports stock management. In this way, veterinarians can anonymously compare farms that keep identical groups of animals and analyze the historical development in the respective stock using graphics. In combination with QS findings data and salmonella monitoring, a much more comprehensive assessment of animal health on the farm is possible.
Many software programs in veterinary practices support the automated transfer of receipts to the QS antibiotics database. Duplicate entries in both databases are therefore not necessary and with the help of plausibility checks, duplicates and incorrect messages during data entry are avoided.
Hinrichs is confident that participation in QS antibiotics monitoring will also pay off in the long term for cattle farmers: We are aware that the documentation effort is unusual, especially for smaller farms. However, our experience with pigs and poultry shows that the use of antibiotics in these animal species has been reduced to the minimum that is actually therapeutically necessary in the last ten years.
I'm sure that a comprehensive look at animal health will also pay off for beef cattle, and the documentation effort is not really higher thanks to the option of automatic forwarding to the state TAM database.
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