Animal board invited review: precision livestock farming for dairy XXXX with a focus on oestrus detection.

@entity1 @entity1273 @entity1132 @entity1271 @entity209 @entity291
UNASSIGNED: Dairy @entity291 are high value farm animals requiring careful management to achieve the best results. Since the advent of robotic and high throughput milking, the traditional few minutes available for individual @entity1 attention daily has disappeared and new automated technologies have been applied to improve monitoring of dairy @entity291 production, nutrition, fertility, health and welfare. @entity291 milked by robots must meet legal requirements to detect healthy milk. This review focuses on emerging technical approaches in those areas of high cost to the farmer (fertility, @entity209 , @entity1271 , @entity1273 and calving). The availability of low cost tri-axial accelerometers and wireless telemetry has allowed accurate models of behaviour to be developed and sometimes combined with rumination activity detected by acoustic sensors to detect oestrus; other measures (milk and skin temperature, electronic noses, milk yield) have been abandoned. In-line biosensors have been developed to detect markers for ovulation, pregnancy, @entity1132 , @entity1271 and metabolic changes. Wireless telemetry has been applied to develop boluses for monitoring the rumen pH and temperature to detect @entity209 . Udder health requires a multisensing approach due to the varying inflammatory responses collectively described as @entity1271 . Lameness can be detected by walk over weigh cells, but also by various types of video image analysis and speed measurement. Prediction and detection of calving time is an area of active research mostly focused on behavioural change.
