In recent years the dairy industry had to face new environmental regulations and consumption evolutions. The soybean meal utilization as a protein source is not adapted to the GMO-free milk production. That’s why there was a growing interest for GMO-free rapeseed meal to replace soybean meal but since …

Animal welfare is a multidimensional phenomenon and currently its on-farm assessment requires complex, multidimensional frameworks involving farm audits which are time-consuming, infrequent and expensive. The core principle of precision agriculture is to use sensor technologies to improve the efficiency …

Small scale farmers in Kenya face low milk yields from dairy cows. One of the causes is the low quality and quantity of roughage on small-scale farms. Overall in all Kenyan farming systems the dairy production is influenced by seasonal fluctuation of roughage production. Next to this it is known that …

The goal of this research was to find out if, and if yes, how, grazing management could be used to improve concentrate feed efficiency and thus farm income on commercial Irish dairy farms. The research was carried out on a commercial Irish dairy farm milking 240 crossbred cows on a dry farm with sandy …

In order to increase feed quality, additive has been used to increase silage storage stability. During feeding time, the silage is exposed to oxygen and a degrading process starts decreasing dry matter and increasing temperature. This rise in temperature makes the silage less appetising to cows, few …

Cows housed indoors with cubicles are probably more restricted in their choice of lying posture and orientation compared with cows housed on pasture. We therefore studied lying postures on pasture in Uruguay and the Netherlands, and in cubicles in the Netherlands, also recording orientation on pasture …

Animal welfare has a high importance this day and age. In 1998 the 'Five freedoms' of Brambell have been put in the European law. Thermal comfort for dairy cows is in these five freedoms and so thermal discomfort must be avoided. Heat stress affects animal welfare, milkproduction, udder-health and reproduction …

The objective of this study was to determine if a 3-dimensional computer vision automatic locomotion scoring (3D-ALS) method was able to outperform human observers for classifying cows as lame or nonlame and for detecting cows affected and nonaffected by specific type(s) of hoof lesion. Data collection …

This study was conducted to investigate dairy farming practices and gross margin at smallholder dairy farmer level to design a business model for scaling up climate-smart dairy in Ziway-Hawassa milk shed. 80 sample dairy farmers from five districts (which then categorised as urban and peri-urban dairy …

When the daily routine of a cow is disturbed, it may have a detrimental effect on the performance of activity meters to detect estrus. It is possible that during the pasture period, the daily routine of cows is disturbed, adversely affecting the performance of activity meters to detect estrus which does …