In Vietnam, digital systems are helping farmers

Quang Doan Hong is a busy man. The accountant lives with his family in Vietnam’s Hung Yen province and owns a farm with about 600 pigs.

He has to quickly learn about the pigs’ health, from which vaccines are working to when to use antibiotics.

“When the weather changes, I feed the pigs antibiotics,” said Mr. Hong. In his experience, the rapid change between sunny and rainy days makes it necessary to feed the pigs antibiotics to treat respiratory and diarrheal diseases.

Mr Hong also had to understand which sources of information were reliable. He joined agricultural groups and did research online, though he realised some of the information on Facebook was unreliable. “I needed to filter it,” he explained.

As his business has grown, Mr. Hong has become less willing to have veterinarian visits.

He worries about the risk of disease transmission from people coming into contact with animals in multiple locations. Some large farms are requiring animal health workers to quarantine for several days before entering the farms.

One thing that has worked for Mr Hong is hybrid information sources: combining the expertise of a veterinarian with the convenience of digital access.

Such televeterinary technologies are under development.

The team behind Farm2Vet, a veterinary app for farmers, recently won the top prize at Trinity Challenge, a charity dedicated to tackling global health threats.

The competition won by Farm2Vet focuses on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – a pressing global threat in which our limited antibiotic medicines become less effective as pathogens adapt.

Farms that overuse antibiotics can become breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These bacteria can then enter the food system and the environment, for example through animal feces. Some resistant bacteria, such as some strains of E. coli, can be transmitted between animals and humans.

“A lot of the misuse and overuse of antibiotics has to do with a lack of understanding and a lack of support,” said Marc Mendelson, director of the Trinity Challenge and head of the infectious diseases department at the Cape Town University Hospital.

Professor Mendelsohn said veterinary antibiotics could be very cheap. “Some farmers may not even know they are using antibiotics because they are in the feed.”

Vietnamese regulations currently require a prescription for antibiotics for livestock. But the rule is relatively new and difficult to monitor. Pawin Padungtod acknowledges that in practice, antibiotics are given without a prescription.

Based in Hanoi, Dr Padungtod is the Senior Technical Coordinator at the Emergency Centre for Transboundary Animal Diseases (ECTAD), a department of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Helen Nguyen, who grew up in Vietnam and now lives in the United States as an environmental engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said both countries have problems with the way they use antibiotics in farm animals.

Medically significant antibiotics are used far more frequently on livestock than on humans in the United States, and in Vietnam, only larger farmers can afford or find veterinarians, Nguyen said.

Professor Nguyen and other members of the Farm2Vet team are seeking to address these issues in Vietnam by working with farmers, veterinarians and agricultural suppliers to develop a smartphone app that provides reliable animal care information.

There will be an AI chatbot to answer relatively simple questions and connect with a veterinarian in more complex cases.

“The technology we’re trying to develop is not going to replace veterinarians,” Professor Nguyen said. “Our goal is to enable veterinarians to expand their impact.”

The challenge, she said, is not in developing the technology but in building the knowledge base.

While there are Vietnamese-language veterinary publications, the amount of data required to feed into an AI may exceed the amount of data that already exists in Vietnamese. Since a large amount of published veterinary literature is in English, it is important to carefully translate and localize the information, even at the provincial level.

It will take a few years for the app to be ready. Professor Nguyen said that while the app will be free for farmers to use, the ultimate goal is to achieve financial sustainability, with the goal of allowing advertising and paid agricultural certification programs.

Also in Vietnam, the International Livestock Research Institute is designing an app of the same name, FarmVetCare. The idea is that farmers can use the app to report health anomalies in their livestock to veterinarians. This is intended to help prevent and control animal diseases and diseases that can be transmitted between animals and humans.

Vietnam’s Ministry of Animal Health is trialling a different app to expand the coverage of its digital system for recording animal disease outbreaks. While the system currently allows for daily online reporting at the provincial level, the goal is to further localize reporting, as close to the farm as possible.

“This mobile app will be very useful because now they can start reporting outbreaks closer to where they are,” Dr Padungtod said.

Professor Nguyen said farmers may be reluctant to report veterinary illnesses “because they don’t want to go bankrupt”. Professor Nguyen said the Farm2Vet app will allow farmers to report veterinary illnesses anonymously and the team will not provide identifiable data to anyone.

Professor Mendelsohn believes that these tools that can simplify the reporting process are helpful, especially for subsistence farmers.

They may also help prevent infections, reducing the need for precious antibiotics. “The best bang for the buck is preventing infections – not just in humans but in livestock as well,” Professor Mendelsohn said.

He commented that governments could encourage prevention by making vaccination more widely available. Farmers could reduce the chances of infection by giving farm animals more space to move around. “Intensive animal farming increases stress in animals. This increases disease and risk,” said Professor Mendelsohn.

While the tech world is full of well-intentioned but ultimately little-used apps, pig farmer Hong has expressed interest. He appreciates the apps’ practicality and user-friendliness. “If anything, I’d like to use them,” he said.

• Translated by: Lam Nguyen