Use of conjoint analysis to weight biosecurity practices on pasture-based dairy farms to develop a novel audit tool—BioscoreDairy

Abstract

Risk assessments are important tools to identify deficits in biosecurity management practices. A major strength of some existing tools is that they facilitate cross-country comparisons. However, a weakness is their failure to account for unique intra-national farming enterprise structures such as, for example, pasture-based dairying. Currently, there are no suitable biosecurity risk assessment tools applicable to pasture-based dairying as practiced in Ireland. In addition to a need for enterprise-specific biosecurity risk assessment tools, the weighting of risk scores generated by these tools needs to be context-specific to ensure validity in assessing biosecurity risks in the farming sector of interest. Furthermore, existing biosecurity audits rely exclusively on respondent recall to answer questions about management practices. To address each of these limitations of existing biosecurity risk assessment tools we developed and optimised a new biosecurity risk assessment tool (BioscoreDairy) designed to assess the biosecurity status of pasture-based dairy farms in Ireland. It consists of two parts, a biosecurity questionnaire and a cattle movement records audit. A questionnaire was developed on biosecurity management practices appropriate for a pasture-based dairy system. Multiple national expert groups were leveraged to provide weightings for the different management practices in the questionnaire using the best-worst scaling methodology of MaxDiff. The results of this process provided a numerical categorisation that could then be used to assign scores to the individual biosecurity management practices. These practices were grouped into three biosecurity areas; risk of disease entry, speed of disease spread and diagnosis of infection. Within each of these three areas, a traffic light system was used to compare a farm’s biosecurity risks to other similar farms—least risk (green; within the top third of farms), concerning practice (amber; middle third) and worst practice or greatest risk (red; lowest third). In addition to these scores, the cattle introduction profile of a herd over the previous 3 years, based on nationally recorded data, was audited, compared amongst dairy farm enterprise subtypes, and included in the BioscoreDairy report. BioscoreDairy is therefore the first biosecurity risk assessment tool tailored to pasture-based dairy farm systems, both for individual farm reporting and for benchmarking against comparable farms.