Caring for and maintaining a healthy, high-performance animal and livestock population, helping with production of healthy foods, depending on agricultural structures: in areas dominated primarily by small farming structures (such as the German states of Hesse and Bavaria), caring for a broad range of livestock animals (cattle, pigs, sheep, goats). This field requires that veterinarians be traditional all-around practitioners with broad-based veterinary and interdisciplinary knowledge, and less often veterinarians with specialized knowledge (decreasing), and in isolated cases also meat inspection. The situation is different in areas with highly specialized agriculture (such as the German states of Lower Saxony, Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), where practitioners focus more on caring for livestock populations within the scope of contractual arrangements (increasing).