Collaborative project: Development and evaluation of an automatic optical sensor system for monitoring the body condition of dairy cows – Subproject 2 | FISA - Forschungsinformationssystem Agrar und Ernährung

Collaborative project: Development and evaluation of an automatic optical sensor system for monitoring the body condition of dairy cows – Subproject 2

Project

Project code: 28153T0607
Contract period: 01.03.2008 - 14.10.2011
Budget: 183,289 Euro
Purpose of research: Experimental development

Dairy cows should have an optimal condition, especially at the start of lactation, because there is a period with negative energy balance after calving. There is a variety of methods to evaluate the energy reserves of the cow. In practice the body weight, the visual body-condition-scoring (BCS, Fig.1) and the measurement of the backfat thickness with ultrasound are used amongst others. These methods take a lot of time and depend on technology and operator. In addition, the collected data often have to be recorded manually into the herd management program. Aim of this project is to develop a three-dimensional sensor-system, which evaluates the body condition of dairy cows automatically. Cow data are collected on two experimental farms (BCS, ultrasound, animal weight, feed intake, milk yield, milk composition and energy balance). Combined with the three-dimensional pictures, algorithms will be developed and transferred to the sensor system (Fig.2). Finally, the complete system will be tested in practice and evaluated for its benefit in the herd management.

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