The yearly edition takes you through a journey of animal health and welfare and illustrates the importance of adequate animal care of dairy animals for sustainable production. The 15th edition will dive into key topics like, the power of the welfare language, cooling dairy cattle and providing appropriate shelter, indicators for mastitis and udder health, biosecurity and milk quality.

Through the formal and informal dialogues that took place this year such as the United Nations Food Systems Summit and COP26, it has become clearer that feeding the world’s growing population will require many different and innovative approaches, and that dairy will continue to be an important part of the global food solutions puzzle. While producing and delivering the wholesomeness of dairy is what brings our IDF community together, we are reminded in this edition of the Animal Health Report that dairy production looks very different across our global member countries, and just like the challenge of feeding our growing world population, there is no one size fits all dairy production system.

The report will pinpoint countries from various continents like Nigeria, New Zealand, Chile, Israel, as well as across the EU, and what we can learn from their solutions to track mastitis and milk quality, biosecurity, disease detection and antimicrobial use and resistance. There is also a special chapter on antimicrobial use in animals by the OIE and another one of the SDGs and animal welfare.

Caroline Emond, IDF Director General says:

“IDF’s dynamic work on dairy animal health and welfare supports constructive science-based dialogue within the dairy sector and it’s stakeholders on how to best approach animal health and welfare, its implications for disease prevention and the consideration of all aspects related to farm management, food safety, human health and dairy technology”.

The report is now available to download from the IDF website: IDF Animal Health Report N° 15