Antimicrobial resistance, which decreases the efficacy of antibiotics and other antimicrobials, has led to concerns about the use of antibiotics in livestock production. Consumers play an important role in influencing producers’ decisions about the use of antimicrobials through their choices in the marketplace, which are driven by attitudes toward these practices. This study examines consumers’ levels of concern about (and acceptance of) the use of antibiotics in livestock production for four objectives: to treat, control, and prevent infections, and to promote growth. Results reveal that the majority of respondents were highly concerned about antibiotic use to promote growth in livestock production and considered this use to be unacceptable. Participants with higher objective knowledge of antibiotic resistance and antibiotic use in livestock production were more likely to accept antibiotic use to treat and control disease, but less likely to accept its use to prevent disease or to promote growth. Participants with high levels of trust in the livestock industry were more likely to accept antibiotic use to control and prevent infections and to be neutral about antibiotic use to promote growth in food animals. Respondents who believed that antibiotic use decreases animal welfare were more likely to be very concerned about antibiotic use to treat, prevent, and control disease, and less likely to accept antibiotic use to treat diseases in food animals. The study findings should be of interest to producers considering the adoption of sustainable technologies and production practices, food retailers making procurement decisions, and policymakers identifying policies that can alleviate antimicrobial resistance in the agri-food sector.

Implementing strategies to navigate large-scale ecological transitions in grasslands is one of this century's greatest conservation challenges. In the US Great Plains, managing areas impacted by woody transitions have been reactive, short-lived, costly, and ineffective. Along with current technological innovation in rangeland monitoring, the promise of early warning science is to provide managers with sufficient time to be better prepared for novel signals of ecological change. Combining the science of early warning signals and frameworks such as the Resist - Accept - Direct (RAD) can provide land managers with guidelines to identify proactive strategies when facing ecological change. Using this approach, we found that opportunities to resist woody transitions decreased from 84 % to 60 % between 1990 and 2020 over the entire biome but remained highest in the northern and western Great Plains, which contributes to large scale conservation targets. These are key areas to prioritize resist opportunities. In contrast, 11 % of the biome exhibited early warning transition signals across all hierarchical scales by 2020, a fourfold increase since 1990. Lastly by 2020, 30 % of the biome exhibited early warning signals across multiple but not all scales. Here, efforts may be more effective when management is directed to conserve fragmented grassland legacies within a woody-dominated matrix and avoid large-scale monocultures of problematic encroaching woody species. Our multi-scale study indicates that 1) anchoring to the last remaining grassland core areas with no early warning of transitions and 2) strategically investing in these intact grasslands may provide the best results for grassland conservation.