Antibiotics are used on a daily basis in animal farms all over the world, for different reasons and in a very wide variety of situations: to treat sick animals, to prevent diseases or simply to increase productivity through their effects on animal growth... It is therefore important to have a far clearer understanding of how the men and women who work with livestock use (or not) antibiotics and how their working conditions determine the way they manage animal health. Farmers, veterinarians, technical advisers, scientists, sales representatives from various industries or agricultural cooperatives… all of these people set foot at varying frequencies in livestock farms to provide the knowledge, practices and techniques that shape the way antimicrobials are used, prescribed and circulate. Our projects seek to analyse how these actors work and interact on a daily basis.
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To reduce antimicrobials in livestock, alternatives approaches are nowadays developing, in particular those based on the use of medicinal plants. Very often, those changes are initiated by women.
This is the first article of a series dedicated to the use of homeopathy by dairy farmers. The origin of this research comes from a field survey on organic farming,...