Just as the landscape is changing on a global economic front as outlined in my previous blog, so then are the characteristics of competitiveness as we look out into the next five year horizon. Many years ago, responding to the advent of scale in animal production, veterinary science in production agriculture moved from a focus on individual animal treatment to something widely referred to as herd health. The change signaled a move from diagnosing and treating individual animals to defining the conditions within which the herd would be best served and proscribed culling for individuals that did not conform or adapt to the generalized conditions. Defining the conditions best for the herd meant creating SOPs for bio-security, ventilation, average temperature at each day of age, average nutrition and a set of standard vaccinations as examples. Not every individual animal prefers the average or thrives in the average conditions and the response in general was to allo