Anticipating risk: Simulations shaping livestock decisions
The next livestock disease outbreak rarely announces itself. It begins quietly: a sick animal at a market, a delayed vaccination, a weather shift that changes where disease-carrying vectors thrive.
- livestock productivity
The next livestock disease outbreak rarely announces itself. It begins quietly: a sick animal at a market, a delayed vaccination, a weather shift that changes where disease-carrying vectors thrive. By the time losses appear in trade figures or household incomes, the most flexible moment for response has already passed.
At the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) with support of the CGIAR Sustainable Animal and Aquatic Foods Program, a growing suite of interactive simulators has been designed to operate inside that narrow window, before decisions harden into crisis.
“These tools are not designed to predict the future,” says Sirak Bahta, Senior Scientist at ILRI. “They help decision-makers explore how choices today shape outcomes tomorrow.”
Developed by ILRI’s policy and foresight modelers working alongside animal health and climate teams, they allow users to test disease control strategies in advance and see how those decisions ripple through herds, markets, land, and livelihoods over time.
The premise is simple. Disease control is not only a technical problem, but an economic one. And the costs of delay, underinvestment, or misalignment are rarely visible until it is too late.
Turning disease risk into a decision problem
"The experience is less like a forecast and more like a rehearsal,” Bahta says. “Users adjust vaccination coverage, response delays, quarantine effectiveness or farm practices and immediately see what changes. Herds expand or shrink. Infection curves rise or flatten. Prices react. Benefits shift between producers and consumers.”
What distinguishes these tools is not their sophistication alone, but what they connect. Disease dynamics sit alongside market behavior. Farmer decisions shape consumer prices. Biosecurity choices influence profitability. Veterinary choices quickly become economic ones. Together, these tools shift the question from predicting outbreaks to understanding how choices, timing, investment, and coordination shape outcomes long before crisis arrives.
Timing reshapes Rift Valley fever
Rift Valley fever, a mosquito-borne disease that flares unpredictably, has repeatedly disrupted livestock systems and trade across East Africa.
ILRI’s interactive Rift Valley fever simulator places users in charge of outbreak response. They choose between regular vaccination, reactionary vaccination, or none at all. They set thresholds for action, define how long it takes to roll out vaccines once an outbreak is detected, and determine how many animals can realistically be reached each week.
In this model, delay reshapes the outbreak. Waiting stretches the infection curve and deepens economic damage. Early action pulls the peak down and cushions the shock to markets and household income. Time, in this system, is never neutral.
Counting the cost of PPR
Peste des petits ruminants, or PPR, devastates sheep and goat herds and threatens food security for millions of smallholders. Global eradication efforts are underway, but success depends on strategy, not intent.
ILRI’s PPR simulator, developed using data from southern India, allows users to test vaccination pathways under real-world constraints: no vaccination, reactionary campaigns and regular vaccination at different frequencies. Each choice shapes herd mortality, recovery, and long-term productivity.
Addressing the logistics challenge of vaccination is central. Improving coverage, vaccination capacity (how many animals can be reached quickly), frequency matters. The cost of being late compounds the risk over time.
Turning disease control into public value
One of the most policy-relevant tools in the suite moves beyond epidemiology into economics. The economic surplus dynamics simulator, built around PPR vaccination in Uttar Pradesh, India, translates disease control into public value.
The model rests on the straightforward idea that when animals stay healthy, production becomes cheaper and more reliable. More meat reaches the market, even if demand stays the same. Higher productivity improves outcomes for farmers and consumers benefit from price stability. Society gains from the combined effect, known as economic surplus.
The simulator tracks how vaccination shifts supply and how markets respond. The gains are calculated as consumer and producer surplus, then expressed in terms decision makers recognize, including net present value and benefit-cost ratios. Vaccination emerges not as a cost to absorb, but as an investment that reshapes markets long after outbreaks fade.
Together, the PPR spread and economic surplus models tell a more complete story of how control happens, and why it pays.
Balancing herds and land health in Somaliland
Some simulators expand beyond disease control, examining how animal health decisions interact with land systems, trade pressures, and environmental limits.
In Somaliland, livestock is not one sector among many––it is the economy. Sheep and goat exports underpin national income and household livelihoods, while fragile rangelands set hard limits on how much pressure the system can absorb.
The Somaliland livestock simulator places users inside that tension, allowing them to choose a role as either pasture manager or export program director.
As a pasture manager, the task is to balance herd growth with land health. Decisions about female offtake rates shape reproduction and herd size, while choices around charcoal demand determine how quickly rangelands degrade. If extraction is pushed too far, pasture collapses, and recovery takes years.
As an export program director, the focus shifts to market access. Vaccination policies determine whether herds meet international health requirements or trigger partial or total trade bans. Disease outbreaks ripple outward, cutting exports and undermining national income.
The simulator leaves no doubt about how pressures compound. Overgrazed land weakens herds, heightening disease risk. Disease outbreaks close markets, thus intensifying pressure on land and livelihoods.
In Somaliland’s case, animal health policy, land management, and trade regulation are not parallel tracks, but the same system.
Preventing loss in poultry systems
Not all livestock health crises arrive as dramatic outbreaks. Some unfold slowly, through everyday decisions.
In poultry systems, disease risk often prompts routine antimicrobial use, not always because it is effective, but because it is familiar and immediately available. ILRI’s antimicrobial use in poultry systems simulator places users in the role of a peri-urban chicken farmer weighing disease risk against farm economics.
Preventive strategies, such as vaccination, hygiene, and stronger biosecurity, sharply reduce bird losses and protect profits. If poorly designed or inconsistently applied, they can still drive higher antimicrobial use. Reactive strategies reduce antimicrobial use, but often at the cost of greater disease losses.
A related poultry tool, i-MaDE-IT, applies the same logic to the highly contagious Marek’s disease. By linking disease dynamics to farm finances, the simulator allows producers and advisors to test vaccination timing, revaccination coverage, and biosecurity measures against outcomes such as gross margins and benefit–cost ratios.
Across both models, prevention pays, but only when it is timely, targeted, and aligned with farm realities. Short-term savings can undermine long-term viability, while routine fixes can accumulate into system-level risk.
Integrating of foot-and-mouth disease
Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) is often described as low mortality, yet its true damage moves through markets in form of falling production falls, spiking prices and tightening trade. Most of the shock is absorbed by smallholders.
The foot and mouth disease economic simulator integrating herd dynamics, disease spread, and market behavior compares FMD control strategies ranging from no intervention to vaccination, quarantine, and combined approaches. Integrated strategies stabilize supply and prices more effectively, delivering the largest gains in consumer welfare and overall economic value, even when producer gains fluctuate in the short term.
The simulator is a reminder that disease control influences who benefits, not just the benefit.
Modeling climate and value-chain trade-offs
The same modeling logic now extends beyond animal health into climate-sensitive value chains.
In Mongolia’s cashmere sector, ILRI’s i-FOCUSS simulator explores how herd size, grazing pressure, carbon emissions, and incomes interact. Users test decisions that raise short-term earnings against long-term land degradation and climate costs.
The lesson mirrors the disease models. Choices compound. What protects income today can undermine resilience tomorrow.
Making the invisible visible
On screen, outbreaks can be rewound and decisions undone. In real life, they cannot.
That gap between simulation and reality is the focus. These tools offer something rare in public policy; a chance to see consequences taking shape, and to choose differently while there is still time.
Like all system models, these simulations do not eliminate uncertainty. Disease dynamics, farmer behavior, and the emergence of antimicrobial resistance are shaped by factors that cannot be fully observed or predicted in advance. That uncertainty is not a flaw to eliminate, but a reason to work more closely with field projects, veterinary services, and producers to test assumptions, validate model behavior, and refine parameters using real-world evidence.
It would be easy to describe these simulators as educational tools, but that undersells their role. They function as decision infrastructure. Veterinary services stress-test contingency plans. Policymakers explore how shocks propagate through markets. Donors assess returns before committing funds. Farmers and extension agents examine practical choices under constraint.
On screen, the future is still negotiable. That is what makes these tools valuable. Not because they predict what will happen, but because they make clear what could happen, and what it would cost to ignore it.
This work was conducted as part of the CGIAR Sustainable Animal and Aquatic Foods (SAAF) Program, a component of CGIAR’s 2025–2030 Research Portfolio. We also acknowledge support from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA); the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC); the European Union (EU); USAID; the Global Alliance for Livestock Veterinary Medicines (GALVmed); the CGIAR program on Sustainable Animal Productivity for Livelihoods, Income, Nutrition and Gender Inclusion (SAPLING), Global Environment Facility (GEF), and the international Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). CGIAR research is supported by contributions to the CGIAR Trust Fund. CGIAR is a global research partnership for a food-secure future dedicated to transforming food, land, and water systems in a climate crisis.
This article was written by: Geoffrey Njenga1, Sirak Bahta1, Francis Wanyoike1, Derek Chan1, Joshua Aboah2, Dolapo Enahoro1, Isabelle Baltenweck1, Joseph Karugia1, Ralph Jean-Pierre3, Karl Rich4, Fiona Fintan1, Benard Bett1, Michel Dione1
- International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)
- WorldFish
- Université de Montréal, Canada
- Virginia Tech, USA