International projects
Applying new electronic sensors to create animal condition scoring protocols for the automated measurement of health and welfare traits for use in sustainable organic dairy cow breeding programmes
Organisations (1)
Abstract
The OptiScore project is an industry-academic knowledge transfer partnership to apply new electronic sensor technologies to create dairy cow condition scoring protocols for the automated measurement of animal health and welfare traits appropriate to the requirements of breeding programmes geared to the needs of the organic farming sector.It will be hosted by a UK high technology SME in order to transfer knowledge with leading animal scientists and farm economists from research institutions located in Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Israel, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.Modern commercial dairy breeding programmes have concentrated on cow milk yield, but this emphasis on production efficiency has resulted in undesirable behavioural and health problems with the animals. The practical use of many viable animal traits is currently constrained by recording difficulties because of the lack of automated means of capturing such data.Manual observation methods are too time-consuming, costly and subjective, making it impossible to obtain significant data on a routine basis. This has severely constrained the feasible goals of selective breeding, forcing organic farmers to rely on conventional breeding stock even though narrow, production-orientated breeding goals are generally very poorly suited for alternative and welfare-friendly farming systems. OptiScore will create new methods and protocols to ensure that new sensor technologies can be used to routinely and cost-effectively capture data concerning a broad range of behavioural and health-related traits in dairy cattle under diverse environmental conditions.The project will both drive the development of new sensor systems and validate their practical application, whilst remaining orientated around the specific requirements of the organic farming sector. This will directly respond to the need for new technology and information in organic dairy farming breeding (European Action Plan for Organic Food and Farming).
