Alternative Medicines on the Farm: A Study of Dairy Farmers' Experiences in France
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite being of debatable efficacy, alternative medicines are in regular use on both organic and conventional dairy farms as part of a strategy for limiting the on-farm use of antibiotics. The study presented here examined French dairy farmers' understanding of and experiences with these medicines, focusing on homeopathy, aromatherapy and phytotherapy. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach combining animal science and sociology, we considered how dairy farmers' use of alternative medicines fits into a holistic approach to herd health management, on the one hand, and into farmers' networks of professional relationships, on the other. Our findings show that farmers are interested in alternative medicines for reasons that are at once technical, ethical, and economic. In the absence of local veterinarians specializing in homeopathy and aromatherapy, farmers enroll in short-term training courses to learn how to use these medicines. Alternative medicines are not a substitute for conventional medicine for these farmers; rather, they constitute one part of a holistic approach to herd health that combines preventive measures with a variety of curative treatments, and which is grounded in close attention to the animals' state of health. Farmers make use of guidelines for observing livestock that are central to the veterinary alternative medicine approach. Interestingly, women farmers appear to play an important role in introducing these practices into the management of the farm operation. Finally, farmers' interest in alternative medicines is indicative of their broader expectations for advice and support in moving toward the integrated management of livestock health, a key element of the agroecological transition. Recognizing these expectations offers useful insights for rethinking the role of veterinarians in dairy farming.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".