DairyICT

Project information
This multidisciplinary project seeks to integrate and extend existing state of the art technologies to ensure sustainable and responsible management of dairy units, with focus on cow health, milk quality and reduced emissions. We shall focus on milk metabolomic methods for determination of metabolic health, biomarker technologies for assessment of systemic health and accelerometer collars for measuring various activities including feeding behaviour, and hence intake. We shall also have access to NIR technology for feed quality assessment and rumen-bolus technology for measurment of rumen pH. We have advanced teleonomic technologies that will enable us to integrate these input data into decision support tools. Our technologies will monitor animals and environment, detect deviations from the normal state and either respond automatically to restore the normal state or issue an alert to husbandry staff. We have access to a range of dairy units for evaluation of the technologies.
Project partners: 
Department of Veterinary Clinical and Animal Sciences
Department of Animal Science
Veterinary Physiology
Newcastle University
Centre for Intelligent Dynamic Communications (CIDCOM)
INRA Research Unit Systemic Modelling applied to Ruminants
Department of Animal Medicine, Production and Health,
SAC
Fermoy
Project dates: 
March 2013 to March 2016
Contact
Contact person: 
Chris Knight
Contact email: 
Contact organisation: 
Department of Veterinary Clinical and Animal Sciences
Funding
Funding agency: 
ICT and robotics for sustainable agriculture