Healthier stock always leave a better financial return, regardless of weather, prices or politics. They also enjoy better welfare, have a lower environmental impact, require less antibiotics and are good for our mental health.

Threats to animal health come in all shapes and sizes including infectious diseases, metabolic and nutritional conditions, genetic problems, toxin exposures and more. These threats drift and shift over time and predicting what will be the ‘big stories’ for 2023 is impossible. SRUC Vet Services are proud to work with farmers and their vets to continually monitor these threats and understand them better to help protect animal health nationally.

Most of the risks we are likely to face this year are manageable on farm but staying on top of them all is challenging, and no two farms are the same.

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Taking an hour or so to focus on your farm's health risks could make a big financial impact this year. Try following these five steps to optimise health risk management on your farm in 2023:

1. Start with the team. Successful animal health risk management is always a team game, so this is the first priority. Make sure everybody that has a role in looking after your stock is included in the conversation including staff on farm, your vet, nutritionist and any other consultants whose advice you value.

2. Set targets. To get the benefits from time spent on risk management we need to be pro-active and forward looking. Discuss and agree specific health performance targets on fertility, animal survival and growth rates for your stock in 2023. Make sure they can be measured so that we can know if we hit them or not.

3. Identify banana skins. Next, focus on what might stop you hitting these targets in the next three of four months. Where are the slippy banana skins for your farm? For every immediate risk your team can identify think of one way you could make that less likely, then prioritise that action. Having a clear and agreed plan to investigate quickly if disease problems occur will bring greater understanding for future years.

4. Catch-up over the year. Make a commitment to catch-up again with your team 2 or 3 times over the year. At each meeting have a look back at the targets you set and record any significant events since last meeting. Check to see if the actions that were agreed have been done, and then repeat the ‘banana skin’ process for the next few months.

5. Review. Once the year moves around check to see if you hit your targets. We normally don’t achieve all targets as unexpected things will happen, disease threats will change and we may even make some ‘mistakes’ along the way. As long as we know why we didn’t hit a target then we have done our job. That is the critical bit of information we need to continuously improve health management on farm going forward.

• SRUC Vet Services are supported by Scottish Government to offer a comprehensive diagnostic service to Scottish livestock farmers. When used as part of an ongoing health risk management process this can greatly improve health risk management for your herd or flock.