Alternative - Herbal Livestock Health Practices

Alternative - Herbal Livestock Health Practices

Summary

We have been working on completing the sourcebook, and we have submitted a proposal to Iowa State Press to publish a book about alternative and herbal livestock health care practices. The sourcebook will be a resource book about alternative and herbal livestock health care practices for USDA personnel, such as Cooperative Extension and NRCS. We will produce 200 copies of the book for distribution to USDA and others in the Northeastern U.S. We also will create a web site that contains the most of the information in the sourcebook.

The proposal to publish a book about alternative and herbal livestock health care practices was submitted to Iowa State Press at the request of the Iowa State Press. The book would be an expanded version of the proceeding from the conference we held on alternative and herbal livestock health care practices.

Objectives/Performance Targets

Organize and host a workshop for the Northeast on complementary and alternative approaches to livestock nutrition and health. Publish a proceedings of the workshop.

Develop a sourcebook for agricultural professionals in the U.S. about complementary and alternative approaches to livestock nutrition and health, and about poisonous plants that affect livestock health. The format for the development and publication of the book would be the German Commission E’s monographs about herbal remedies used in human medicine.

Create a web page containing the information in the sourcebook and in the workshop proceeding.

Accomplishments/Milestones

We completed the first objective on October 20 and 21, 2000, when we held a conference called “Alternative and Herbal Livestock Health Conference: A scientific review of current knowledge.” The conference proceedings and information about the conference are available at www.sp.uconn.edu/~wwwahlhc.

For objective two, we are developing the sourcebook about complementary and alternative approaches to livestock nutrition and health, and about poisonous plants that affect livestock health for agricultural professionals. We have almost completed the sourcebook; the work remaining is to develop monographs of plants commonly used in alternative practice. The list of plants for the monograph was developed by the scientists and veterinarians who participated in the conference in October of 2000.

Objective three is to create a web page containing the information in the sourcebook. We have developed a plan with the University of Connecticut’s computer staff to upload the sourcebook to the University’s web site. Our secretary has been trained in the use of the software necessary to create the web site.

A new objective—to publish a book on alternative and herbal livestock health care practices—has been added to the list. This new objective was added after Iowa State Press in Ames, Iowa connected us about submitting a proposal to publish a book on this topic. Iowa State Press is interested in publishing this information because there is not much information available in print on the topic of alternative and herbal livestock health care practices. We submitted a proposal to Iowa State Press, and we are waiting for their reply. The proposal contained a list of chapter titles and authors, two sample chapters, and a list of organizations that would be interested in the book. The chapters in the book will be written by authors who participated in our conference, as well as chapters written by authors with expertise in other areas of alternative health care. We have had much interest from authors to write chapters for the book. If our proposal is accepted by Iowa State Press, we will publish the book and the support of the SARE program will noted on the cover of the book.

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