Modeling farm-level strategies for improving food safety in the dairy chain

Increasing public awareness of food safety concerns, together with the recognized importance of an integrated ‘farm to table’ approach to food safety, are reaching all the way to the practices and procedures used on farms. This has created the need to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of alternative strategies for increasing food safety on the dairy farm as being part of the chain. The objectives of this study were to (1) examine the optimal farm strategies for achieving different levels of chemical and microbiological food safety in the dairy chain, (2) provide insight into the effect of farm size on these strategies and economic consequences both for the farm and the chain. The study starts with developing a set of control measures that could be implemented at different points on a farm and within the chain. The extra costs of implementing and maintaining these measures were calculated using a partial budgeting method. The effectiveness of the measures at improving food safety was assessed by 22 experts using adaptive conjoint analysis. This information on alternatives, costs, and effectiveness was used to build an integer linear programming model that minimized the costs of attaining different food safety levels over the entire chain.