Project aims to apply AI to monitor animal welfare
A European-Union-funded project aims to monitor animal welfare with AI using farm sensor data from existing on-farm sensors. The project is called ClearFarm and would not only monitor animal welfare and report it to producers but push farm animal welfare scores to consumers. The project recently reported that validated reviews of commercially available sensors have led to the conclusion that it is possible to monitor dairy cow welfare in this way.
The company envisions the following for its user interface:
“The farmer interface displays daily welfare scores for individual cows in three welfare areas (housing, nutrition, and health), along with an overall score. A traffic-light color scheme indicates cow welfare – red to indicate a high welfare risk and green indicating good welfare, allowing farmers to set alerts if scores fall below a certain threshold.”
Read more about the project here.
Supreme International (Sponsor)
Supreme International is the first company in North America to
manufacture the vertical feed processor and is recognized as the best
TMR processor in the world. Learn more here.
Irish inventors open up about how a skin patch for cows would work
The Irish inventors of a battery-free, chipless, skin patch that could one day send cow health data via radar waves recently explained how their technology works and how it might be applied to cows.
In this podcast episode, “Wireless Comms for Cows,” they discuss how their radar-like tags communicate (see 6:00 mark) and where on cows the tags could be placed (see 13:00 mark). They also explain why this could be an improvement over RFID technology (see 25:00 mark).
The researchers used robots and AI to fine tune the radar-like communication channels. The shape of the wire in the tag is what communicates the signal that a reader receives. So if the tag gets bent from its original shape it will communicate a completely different signal. That could pose a problem in a dairy environment.
The researchers clearly state that cows are not the main focus of their research. Human applications are more appealing to them. (Think bio-tracking contact lenses.) Plus, this technology is still years away from a commercial application, as there are no commercial signal readers for this technology yet.
Listening to the podcast, the concept that intrigued me the most was a possible udder patch that could detect a temperature increase when mastitis is present. Or maybe perhaps an advanced heat detection patch that would be able to detect if a cow had been mounted (mounting would likely bend the wires and communicate a signal not originally intended).
Maybe we'll see this on cows down the road – well, at least a few years down the road.
Learn more about the technology here.
Afimilk (Sponsor)
On his 1,400-cow dairy, Jeff Potter has boosted conception rates and saved money on labor and meds with Afimilk technology. Explore how you can, too.
Researchers announce breakthrough in vaccine production for cow parasites
A recent breakthrough may help scientists develop vaccines against cow parasites even faster. There are currently only three available vaccines against parasitic worms. But a discovery of how to make them with sugars mimicked from plant structures could lead to more vaccine options and a wider availability of commercial vaccines.
Read more here.
Dairy profit projections from ZISK
Projected profitability for the next 12 months for two dairy herd sizes
DECREASED
in recent profit projections from ZISK.
ZISK is a profit-projection smartphone app that tracks individual dairy farm profitability based on current CME board prices. Projections for a 1,000-cow dairy producing an average of 80 pounds of milk per cow and a 2,500-cow dairy producing an average of 85 pounds of milk per cow are provided.
12-month dairy farm profit projections (as of Nov. 30, 2023):
1,000-cow dairy = $208,100 (DOWN about $39,800 in the last week)
2,500-cow dairy = $1.332 million (DOWN about $1,000 in the last week)