Systems Thinking Perspectives on Stewardship and Our Future

The management and care of livestock can be integrated with a stewardship philosophy and a systems approach to health and wellness. Stewardship is the responsible management of things entrusted to one's care. This philosophic approach means that every resource in livestock production, the land, livestock, and people, must be considered in the care and feeding of livestock and the practice of veterinary medicine. The systems thinking discipline is a set of synergistic investigative skills, used to improve the capability of identifying and understanding complex adaptive systems, predicting their behaviors, and devising modifications to them to produce desired changes.