The WelFarm Technical Advisory Group (TAG) was established about a year ago.
Members include WelFarm Governance Board member, Stephen Hopkinson, as Chair with vets Greg Lindsay and Ben Finlayson, and technicians, Laura Dalzell and Tai Ibbetson, from WelFarm member practices. Soon after it was established it invited Mike Shallcrass from Fonterra to join to provide an independent and wider dairy industry perspective.
The role of the TAG is to provide advice to the WelFarm board and general manager with respect to three main areas:
Meeting the WelFarm board-approved strategic objectives
Software use and development feedback and ideas
Implementation within clinics and on-farm
Since its inception, the TAG has met several times to discuss and provide advice.
Some examples of discussions include:
Ideas to manage autumn and split-calving herds
Barriers to clinic and vet uptake
The current dashboard use of ‘speed dials’ pros and cons
Improved methods of displaying antibiotic usage including, how to present data in a farmer-friendly way and standardised methods for benchmarking, which was a larger undertaking than it sounds!
Methods of displaying BVD testing information
Improved targets for BCS and methods of displaying results, including adjusting targets and more relevant ways to display the data to support benchmarking and improvement
Managing Animal Wellbeing Plans for Fonterra suppliers
Feel free to reach out to any of our TAG members to discuss your ideas to further support and develop WelFarm for the future.
