Effects Of Diseases Pests And Parasites

A dead animal is the loss every farmer notices. It is rarely the biggest one. Long before a disease, pest or parasite kills anything, it has already been quietly stealing growth, milk, eggs and fertility from every animal it touches, and it keeps stealing from the survivors long after the outbreak has passed. A herd that never loses a single animal to worms can still lose a season's profit to them.

In this lesson you will learn exactly what disease costs a farm in production terms, how pests and parasites add costs of their own on top of that, and how a stockman turns these separate effects into one naira figure that tells the true size of the problem. This is the bridge topic for the whole Animal Health section: once you can weigh the damage, every topic that follows on prevention and control will make sense as the way to avoid paying for it.