Assessing farmer willingness to participate in a subsidized veterinary herd health management program

Zoonoses, such as COVID-19, can cause pandemics with many fatalities. Therefore, livestock keepers should attach great importance to livestock disease control. Veterinarians can support farmers in this task through a structured veterinary herd health management (VHHM) program. The dissemination of these programs remained low, and Swiss policy makers planned to launch a subsidy program for VHHM. To inform policy making ex-ante, a survey of 1600 Swiss dairy farmers was conducted to determine whether they are willing to participate and how much they are willing to pay. Contingent evaluation with a discrete choice format elicited willingness to pay (WTP). As a rather high share of farmers who would not participate was expected, a spike model was applied with a single-bounded discrete choice (SBDC) model. Only 47% of the farmers had a positive WTP. Mean WTP in the SBDC was CHF 10.47 per cow and year and in the spike model CHF 57.96. Participation would increase with higher subsidy levels. If the government pays 20% of the costs and farmers pay CHF 96 per cow per year, 23.6% of farms would participate. If the subsidy increases to 80% (CHF 24 for farmers), 40.4% would participate. A logistic regression indicates younger and older farmers, those with lower veterinary costs, and those who consider VHHM relevant only for farms with problems are less likely to participate.