Developing precision livestock farming tools for precision dairy farming

For centuries, milk and dairy products have been an important source of dietary energy, protein, and fat for the global population. Currently, milk is the EU’s number one agricultural product, accounting for circa 15% of agricultural output in terms of value (European Parliament, 2015). The EU diary sector is supported by 650,000 specialized dairy farmers and 18 million milking cows and has a labor force of about 1.2 million people (European Parliament, 2015). However, since the abolishment of milk quotas in 2015, farmers are facing increased pressures to exploit the economies of scale by increasing the size of their herds. With larger numbers of cows per farm, farmers no longer have the same time traditionally had to care for their animals. Therefore, the application of technology is becoming more important for EU dairy farmers than ever before. Precision livestock farming (PLF) represents the application of modern information and computer technology (ICT) for the real-time monitoring and management of animals. In dairy production, PLF systems can be important tools to complement and support the skills of the farmer in the monitoring and assessing cow health and welfare. Automated PLF systems enable dairy farmers to manage larger herds on a more time-efficient manner (Rutten et al., 2013). Automated systems exist to monitor behavioral activities for detection of lameness (Kashiha et al., 2013) and eustrus (Dolecheck et al., 2015). However, there are far fewer studies on the design/implementation of cow behavior monitoring for other important health events such as metabolic diseases or mastitis. When developing PLF systems for real-time monitoring of dairy cow health, welfare, and productivity, the development process should be done within a framework specifically designed for living organisms. A core principle in this regard is that any living organism can be considered a CITD system, which stands for complex, individually different, time-varying, and dynamic (Berckmans and Aerts, 2006; Quanten et al., 2006). A living organism is much more complex than any mechanical, electronic or ICT system. The complexity of information transmission in a single cell of a living organism is for example much higher than in most man-made systems (e.g., today’s most powerful microchip). It is obvious that all living organisms are individually different. The general approach in biological research and the management of biological process (e.g., medical world, livestock world) in industry and society is still to compare groups of living organisms by looking for statistical differences between group averages using experiments. However, there is not a single living organism that lives or acts as the purely theoretical average of a group since all living organisms are individually differDeveloping precision livestock farming tools for precision dairy farming