Use of antibiotics in dairy farming sector further decreased

Last year, the dairy farming sector used less antibiotics again. The data recently published by the Veterinarian Medicines Institute (SDa) show that the average use of antibiotics at dairy farms was lowered by 3.2 percent last year.

This is the fifth consecutive year that the dairy farming sector has succeeded in reducing the use of antibiotics. The use of antibiotics on dairy farms was reduced by 48 percent between 2009 and 2016. The current animal day dosage is 3.01 per year. This still was 5.78 in the year 2009. Almost 75 percent of the antibiotics used at dairy farms is a first-choice medicine. 25 percent of the used antibiotics is a second-choice medicine. The dairy farming sector is the lowest user of antibiotics of all cattle farming sectors.

‘It is again a great achievement that the bovine sector, which is characterised by low use and limited differences between farms, has managed to bring the use even further down’, according to the SDa.

Therefore the benchmarking system and the benchmark values will become less rigid for the bovine sector. According to the SDa no extra efforts are required to get more farms into the target area. Therefore the switch will be made to a system that is solely based on a signalling value.

Also, in view of the low use of antibiotics in the dairy farming sector and the continuous small differences in use between the farms, the SDa deems research into critical success factors in the dairy farming sector unnecessary. This research will be done in other sectors though.