Engineering to support wellbeing of dairy animals.

Animal husbandry refers to the relationship of farmers with their animals and the duty they have to ensure that their animals receive the best care. The challenge for dairy farmers in general is to achieve the best possible standards of animal health and welfare, together with ensuring a high lactational performance and minimal environmental impact. Specific challenges but also management opportunities unique to dairy animals compared to other species are:

. Management attention is centred towards females which have longer expected

  productive lives than most other livestock species

. High-yielding cows have increased susceptibility to heat stress, metabolic (such as

  ketosis, acidosis and hypocalcaemia), infectious (such as mastitis and metritis) and multi-

  factorial diseases (e.g. lameness) which are mainly concentrated immediately after

  calving or early lactation

. The conflict between the farmer’s need for high fertility (early return to oestrous after

  calving) and the cow’s need to avoid additional energetic expenditure.

. Technological and bio-technological innovations in automated health diagnostics are

  More advanced in dairy than in other animal production systems, since a number of

  sensor devices is commercially available at affordable prices

. Regular milking (2-3 times daily) provides opportunities for diagnostic observation. 

These are the challenges and opportunities, but what are the successes? They are rather dismal: Productive lifespan of cows averages 2–3 years and rarely exceeds 3–4 lactations; the culling rate is 21 - 36%. The main involuntary culling reasons are reproductive failures and udder health issues, each comprising between a quarter and a third of total culling. Culling values are greater in larger and higher-yielding dairy farms and under low-forage diets. To further complicate the matter in addressing these issues, for larger farms, this may have to be done with a much lower ratio of husbandry staff to animals. These problems and recent technological developments to facilitate management have been reviewed by Dr G. Caja and colleagues. The reader is referred to their publication in the Journal of Dairy Research, Volume 83 of 2016, page 136 to 147, the title being: Engineering to support wellbeing of dairy animals. 

In their review they showed that recent engineering advances and the decreasing cost of electronic technologies have allowed the development of ‘sensing solutions’ that automatically collect data, such as physiological parameters, production measures and behavioural traits. Such data can potentially help the decision making process, enabling early detection of health or wellbeing problems in individual animals and hence the application of appropriate corrective husbandry practices. The review also focuses on new knowledge and emerging developments in welfare biomarkers (e.g. stress and metabolic diseases), activity-based welfare assessment (e.g. oestrus and lameness detection) and sensors of temperature and pH (e.g. calving alert and rumen function), and the combination and integration thereof into ‘smart’ husbandry support systems that will ensure optimum wellbeing for dairy animals that will ultimately maximise farm profitability. They concluded that the use of novel sensors combined with new technologies for information handling and communication should produce dramatic changes in traditional dairy farming systems.