Alternatives to Antibiotics in Animal Agriculture

Alternative products play a crucial role in allowing farmers and veterinarians to reduce the use of antibiotics. Vaccines are among the most promising and widely used of these alternatives, but pre- and probiotics and other innovative products are also in use or currently being investigated. Many of these have been shown to simultaneously prevent infection and improve animal performance, such as growth rates or egg production. Today, alternative products are primarily useful for growth promotion and infection prevention, with fewer options available for treatment. However, the efficacy of alternative products tends to be variable across individual livestock operations and with the disease status of herds, and is often affected by external factors such as weather or feed composition. More research is needed to understand exactly why efficacy is so variable and to ensure optimized use, but this is complicated by the fact that the mechanism of action (i.e., the molecular processes that generate the desired effect) for many alternative products is not well understood. Alternative products should be considered as one part of a comprehensive herd or flock health management program aimed primarily at the prevention of diseases, rather than curing of infections. An alternative product’s efficacy and cost-effectiveness will be central to farmers’ decisions about whether to use it, and the sharing of experiences and lessons learned is likely to be as important as formal economic analyses. Therefore publicprivate partnerships may be a promising approach for understanding how best to integrate alternative products into overall farm management, as they may allow complementary data from experimental studies and actual use data on commercial operations to be combined and contrasted.