Research Priorities Report: The Multi Actor Farm Health Team Approach

This report focuses on the experiences of DISARM partners who set up and coached Multi-Actor Farm Health Teams (MAFHTs) across 9 countries. The Netherlands and Spain focused on pig farms, Belgium and Latvia on poultry farms, the UK, Romania and Denmark on dairy farms and France and Greece on dairy sheep.

The report outlines what worked well and the challenges experienced with regards to implementing the MAFHT approach, and how likely that these approaches could be embedded into mainstream advisory/regulatory systems. These insights highlighted vast differences in the approaches taken by different EU Member States.

Key areas for further research, funding and regulation include:

• Country-specific analysis of how the MAFHT approach and coaching could be better integrated into regulatory requirements and/or advisory services for livestock farming.
• Conducting cost-benefit analyses to establish strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, as well as tangible financial and animal health performance data resulting from participation in a MAFHT approach.
• Further investment in, and development of, user-friendly data recording/monitoring systems for use at the farm-level to offer useful insights for farm businesses, benchmarking and health planning whilst also meeting regulatory requirements.
• The development and provision of facilitation/coaching training to ensure sufficient workforce to support an increased demand for MAFHT approaches.
• In addition, business models for how to make MAFHT approaches viable if driven by regulatory authorities, advisory services, or farm businesses are needed to establish the sustainability of the approach.