Impact of Agricultural Practices on Tick Population Ecology and Tick-Borne Disease Transmission

Abstract

Ticks and tick-borne diseases represent a growing threat to livestock productivity, rural livelihoods, public health, and agricultural sustainability. Farming practices modify vegetation, microclimatic conditions, host availability, and wildlife–livestock interactions, thereby influencing tick survival, distribution, and pathogen transmission. However, conventional control programmes primarily depend on repeated acaricide application and often overlook ecological drivers, seasonal variation, farm-management conditions, and emerging chemical resistance. This study investigates the impact of livestock density, grazing patterns, pasture rotation, irrigation, vegetation management, land-use change, animal movement, and wildlife accessibility on tick populations and associated diseases. An integrated ecological assessment framework was developed by combining field-based tick sampling, livestock examination, pathogen detection, acaricide-resistance assessment, environmental monitoring, farm-management surveys, statistical analysis, remote sensing, and GIS-based risk mapping. A model-based comparative evaluation was conducted across intensive, extensive, mixed crop–livestock, rotational grazing, and silvopastoral systems. Extensive grazing recorded the highest mean tick burden of 24.8 ticks per animal, while rotational grazing recorded the lowest burden of 8.7. Compared with conventional management, the proposed integrated approach reduced mean tick burden by 59.4%, livestock infestation by 49.3%, pathogen-positive ticks by 51.9%, and disease incidence by 57.1%. It also reduced acaricide applications by 48.5%, treatment failure by 62.3%, and relative control costs by 24%. The findings demonstrate that combining pasture management, herd biosecurity, targeted chemical treatment, resistance monitoring, environmental surveillance, and One Health coordination provides better ecological, epidemiological, and economic performance than conventional chemical-dependent control. The framework supports adaptive and location-specific strategies for sustainable management of ticks and tick-borne diseases in diverse agricultural landscapes