What Is Basco > Health Data

A number of structural changes to support mechanisms, increasing requirements for quality assurance, interest from consumers (supermarkets) in the methods of food production and costs associated with treating animals have led to the development of management systems and breeds that are categorised as 'Easycare' in sheep and low cost maintenance in beef. In short the market wants meat that is produced with less veterinary treatments, is produced in a welfare friendly fashion and has records to support this. Farmers want to produce meat profitably and with less human intervention since this equates to cost. There is an obvious balance required between farmers' needs and market needs in terms of welfare.

To enable its members to respond to this change to market requirements and lead in satisfying sheep and beef supply into this market, BASCO is currently adding further health recording facilities to its database. The benefit of this will be twofold at least:

1. records will be available to members for management purposes
2. the system will aid in quality assurance to prospective buyers
3. records can be used to produce EBV's for subsequent selection

The system will contain diseases already coded and grouped into logical groups e.g. feet problems, udder problems and will contain an extensive list of treatments with their respective codes. This will ensure that all records are comparable since they will be coded correctly and will also reduce the need for data input by breeders.

The system will contain a master list of health events and a master list of treatments. Users will select those they most often use and these will be presented to users by default thereby reducing the need to scroll through a list containing many entries that are not used by the farmer. Of course, the farmer can add and delete from the 'local list' without affecting the master list used by all farmers.