Resilience of Belgian Cattle Farmers Towards Infectious Diseases Outbreaks.

Abstract

The study addresses the growing risk of infectious disease outbreaks in livestock by developing and applying a composite resilience index to evaluate the adaptive capacity of Belgian cattle farmers in implementing biosecurity measures (BSMs). The framework integrates three core dimensions, that is, implementation, feasibility and effectiveness, across three priority diseases representing distinct epidemiological profiles and transmission routes like brucellosis, bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD) and foot-and-mouth disease (FMD). The analysis combines three data sources as follows: (i) a farm-level survey documenting the implementation of 41 BSM across 100 cattle farms, (ii) a feasibility assessment conducted with a panel of 38 farmers and (iii) expert evaluations of the disease-specific effectiveness of each BSM. Farm-level resilience scores were computed by weighting the degree of implementation by the feasibility and effectiveness of each BSM. Results show marked heterogeneity in resilience scores (17% to 99%) and in both the feasibility and adoption of BSM. Several measures assessed as both effective and feasible exhibited low uptake, indicating the existence of behavioural and perceptual barriers. The overall resilience index followed a normal distribution and was significantly higher in dairy farms than in beef farms, while no significant differences were observed between provinces. The study introduces a robust, evidence-based tool for assessing and benchmarking farm-level biosecurity resilience. It concludes that enhancing resilience depends less on the number of BSM implemented than on the strategic selection of context-appropriate, feasible, and effective measures. The findings support a shift towards disease-specific, tailored biosecurity strategies and highlight the need for further research into the behavioural determinants of feasibility.