The Department of Agricultural Engineering (Automation and System engineering (www.agrsci.org) is trying to develop the interest and possibilities of monitoring and registering dairy cow behavior outside. For many years now, the livestock precision farming research has been focusing on barn behaviour, using passive tags, logging tags, light signals, and recently blue tooth technology to transmit real time. The public and the consumers however are focusing on the animal welfare, insisting that dairy cows keep coming out to graze.
In addition animal behavior is more clear in outside situations for example if a cow has lameness symptoms, it will show this decisively in different velocities and moving distance outside. Therefore a time budget based on inside and outside registrations will be necessary for reliable research. This field is only just being developed, and in the line of this research we use the BlueSky Telemetry™ collars.
Spatial distribution of defecation and urination gas also been studied using the BlueSky GPS collars. See attached figures in ppt file, of animal movements with different grazing times (4, 6,5 and 9 hours). In farm management, with large herds, knowing the behaviour of cows could actively be used by the manager. This needs small and cheap sensor boards, that use little energy, and can be put on the cow as ear tag or in the collar. Here sensor networks are being developed, avoiding expensive GPS sensors and large battery packs. However the GPS technology is also advancing, so it might not be necessary. At this time our department is using the BlueSky Telemetry™ collars as a reference to check if the sensor network results are reliable.
As said before, we are very interested in further development and research of these techniques and foresee an increased interest from dairy farming for practical use.
Frank Willem Oudshoorn
phone; 89993106
mobile; 20938700
website; www.automaticmilking.dk
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