Roadmap for nematode control strategies

Determine the production and economic impacts of nematodes and AR for different species and breeds in different ecosystems.
Develop tools to quantify the economic impact of nematode infections at national, regional and farm levels.
Support decision-making by governments, animal health organisations and farmers, taking into account socio-psychological processes.

Current systems use average production estimates and thus lack farm-specificity. They are based on partial budgeting and do not reflect the effect on the whole-farm economic performance.
Evaluation of farmer practices currently takes little account of drivers behind their decisions, leading to top-down recommendations for changes in control strategies that have little impact on behaviour.

Surveys of economic impact that consider farm performance holistically and not just the immediate impact of parasite on production.
Evaluations of the relative production impact of nematodes on more or less resistant/resilient animals within a farm.
Systems to capture parasite levels and production impacts easily on-farm and translate information into decision support.
Concentrate data from the latter into data-bases over wider geographical areas that can be updated with mobile phones, tablets or computers, in order to take account of wider comparisons in decision support.
Additional studies to determine the production impact of nematode infections in various geographical settings, with inclusion of less-studied impacts such as fertility, greenhouse gas emissions.
Use development of various economic modelling approaches and adapt them to the over-dispersed nature of nematode infections.

Stronger collaboration between parasitologists and field vets or farmers with experience in counting nematode eggs, and with animal production background to be able to develop strong field data.
Linking economic models to real data collected on farm, rather than economic models that estimate impact based on previous knowledge on productivity impact only.
A closer collaboration between the model‐makers and model‐users and the stimulation to develop concrete business cases may be the critical success‐factor for these systems to become self‐sustainable in the near future.
Tools to enable accurate information of the level and prevalence of infection to be collected practically by farmers and fed into decisions.

Whereas an increasing amount of data are being generated for the direct production impacts of nematode infections, more emphasis should now be given to the production and economic impacts of AR.
Vets, researchers and farmers should be willing to confirm the efficacy of the drugs used against nematodes on a yearly basis.
Over the last decade, some progress has been made in assessing the production economic impacts of nematodes in ruminants, and these have extensively been reviewed in sheep and in cattle highlighting the need for more specialized research, particularly in the definition of the nutritional cost of nematodes.
A remaining gap is to establish the impact on fertility parameters using randomized intervention field studies.
The major challenge is to develop tools that are able to quantify the economic impact of nematodes at national, regional and farm level to support decision‐making by various stakeholders and that can be used as management tools.
An efficiency analysis approach was successfully developed for GI nematodes in cattle, but it should be converted into a user-friendly advice tool and to other parasite and livestock species.