Tips on evaluating your dairy vet spend

Chatting with a neighbour about vet costs can result in a frantic dash to change vets or cut medicine costs because yours are “too high” in comparison, but that reaction is too hasty as many factors need to be considered to evaluate your vet spend.

Dan Stevenson of LLM Farm Vets and Paddy Gordon of Shepton Vets give advice on how dairy farmers should critique their vet costs.

See also: Dairy farmer cuts vet spend while improving animal health

Analyse your vet medicine spend in detail

Look at exactly where money is going. For example; if you are spending all of your money on “fire-fighting” and treating specific diseases, then what can be done to prevent problems?

If you are spending on preventative measures, such as vaccines, then you are potentially saving disease costs in the long term.

It’s also difficult to look at vet med costs as a fixed cost as things will vary year-on-year.

Although vaccine and sealant use may remain consistent if cow numbers stay the same, there are variable costs that will be linked to disease challenges.

One year a farm may also have used more vet tech services – which may have increased vet costs, but reduced labour costs elsewhere. Therefore, it’s always important to ask first why vet spend has increased.

These figures can be used to benchmark farm vet med costs year on year. Talk to your vet about setting farm-specific vet med targets (above categories from LLM Farm Vets’ Vet Invest package).

Set herd-specific targets 

There are no specific vet med spend targets for different production systems. Instead, these should be decided on an individual farm basis.

Mr Gordon says 1-1.4ppl is a common vet med cost figure identified in most farm costings, while global figures suggest between 3% and 5% of production costs go on vet spend.

However, he also says it’s not advisable to use this as a target and says instead that targets should be farm-specific.  

Mr Stevenson advises sitting down with the farm’s vet, splitting out costs (see box) and benchmarking farm performance against itself. Many vets have a dedicated support package that can help with this.

Focus on preventative measure to protect herd health

He says that focusing on preventative measures will bring long-term benefits and believes every £1 investment in health/disease prevention brings a return of £3 to £4.

Mr Gordon adds: “Every farmer should discuss with their vet what they’re spending money on and where they can both see an opportunity to improve health. Let’s look for the win-win.”

Often a spend in one area can have a knock-on effect in another area. For example, if you’re vaccinating dry cows against calf scours, you will then see a decrease in spend on treatment in their calves.

Understand disease costs, not just the cost of medicines

Having a discussion about return on investment from vet med spend is important.

For example, it may be that an investment of half a day’s vet time – at £500 a day – is needed to investigate why mastitis levels have increased and to get advice on treatment and prevention. However, at £300 a case, if that advice results in two fewer cases of mastitis, you have more than paid for the cost.