The value of One Health and One Welfare approaches in promoting the health and welfare of organic dairy cattle

Publication date: 18/02/2025
Extent: 22 pages

Contributions by: Lindsay Whistance, The Organic Research Centre, UK

Chapter synopsis:

There is a clear need for an integrated approach to human, animal and ecological health reflecting the four organic principles of Health, Ecology, Fairness and Care and their supporting text. In the early 2000s, the One Health approach was established to recognise the strong links between human health and animal and planetary health. Later, the One Welfare approach was established to complement One Health. For organic farming, the challenges with these approaches include the practical focus on health as the presence or absence of named diseases rather than systems integrity as well as a focus on mitigating negative outcomes rather than building positive systems and practices which lead to high welfare for humans, farmed animals and wild animals. It is suggested here that agroecological food production could be better served by using a Post-Normal Science approach (PNS) which is a framework where uncertainty, value loading and different perspectives are considered.

DOI: 10.19103/AS.2024.0138.06