Smart dairy farming: innovative solutions to improve herd productivity

The increase in food global demand, food safety alarms and new dietary trends are straining the farmers: on the one hand, they have to guarantee the welfare and adequate conditions of life for the animals and reduce the environmental footprint; on the other hand, they have also to develop new strategies to improve farm management reducing costs. Effective tools to cope with these challenges have been provided by Precision Livestock Farming (PLF), which is nowadays increasingly applied through the control of quali-quantitative parameters of production, behavior, and animal welfare, including real-time control of individual animal positions. ICT are increasingly adopted in every aspect of livestock farming, thus switching the analysis framework from data-poor to data-rich situation. The research key challenge is therefore to turn those data into knowledge that allows providing real-time support in farming optimization. This project will focus on dairy cattle farming and specifically on different systems to collect, process and derive useful information from data on animal welfare and productivity (i.e. activity, oestrus detection, drinking behaviour, milk production, etc.) since there is a lack in the literature that highlights the need to push forward researches on data monitoring, acquisition and processing. Today cow welfare monitoring systems imply: 1. Data collection from different devices with different features; 2. Management and processing of data collected with different devices; 3. Development, validation and test of numerical models, to characterize cow behaviours with different methods to optimize the management of the farm. The consequent enormous amount of data and files available in modern barns could be able to generate, through specific software, a decision support system to help farmers’ decisions about everyday problems. The project aims to the identification of the relationship among environmental parameters, cow welfare, behaviour and health for the definition of innovative solutions to ensure dairy cow welfare by appropriate management. The project is arranged into the following tasks: 1. Identification of heat stress parameters by Precision Livestock Farming; 2. Evaluating effects of providing free access to pasture on production and welfare of lactating dairy cows; 3. Experimental achievement of an innovative computer vision system for data collection; 4. Automatic oestrus detection to achieve optimal time for insemination and improve cow welfare in hot climate conditions; 5. Big data and advanced analytics for large-scale modelling of behaviour, production and environmental conditions; 6. Environmental and economic assessment. Therefore, the automatic systems and management techniques developed in the project will be innovative tools for decision making in line with the recent trends of breeding widespread in Europe, favoured by the modern discipline known as "smart farming". The results of the project could also have a social impact in helping to provide an answer to the growing demands from the community that requires a greater sustainability of intensive livestock farms in terms of animal welfare. The improvement of reproduction and production efficiency resulting from improving environment, welfare and conditions of dairy cows can have a significant mitigation effect on environmental impact per kilogram of milk. The environmental sustainability of the solutions analysed will be evaluated with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCA is one of the key approaches for the evaluation of the environmental sustainability of the agricultural sector. LCA related to milk production has gained attention in recent years, but the results are often discordant and conditioned by practitioners’ choices. Therefore there is the need in the scientific community to investigate LCA in more housing systems and to identify a methodology that can produce comparable results. The expected impacts of the project can be summarized as follows: 1. Decision support system able to optimize farmers’ choices in term of herd management, equipment renovation and barn design; 2. Provide an answer to the growing demands from the community that requires a greater sustainability of intensive livestock farms in terms of animal welfare; 3. Economic benefits for farmers thanks to the increased capability of forecasting the effects of specific investments on production; 4. Analytical tools developed to significantly enhance food traceability of dairy farms.