Connecterra: Project Happy Cow
Final report
Connecterra: Project Happy CowCall: Services and Applications for Smart Agriculture
Id: 14639
Acronym: HappyCow
Duration:
Wednesday, 31 May, 2017
Consortium:
| No | Partner | Contact | Country | Total 1000€ | Funded 1000€ | Funder |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Coord. | Connecterra | Yasir Khokhar | Netherlands | 424.8 | 91.2 | SmartAgriFood |
| 2 | Wageningen UR Livestock Research Wageningen University and Research Center | Kees Lokhorst | Netherlands | 17.6 | 0.0 | None |
| 3 | Sensors and Circuits VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland | Kaarle Jaakkola | Finland | 85.2 | 59.7 | Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry |
| 4 | SEGES P/S | Frank Oudshoorn | Denmark | 71.8 | 67.4 | Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education Ministry of Higher Education and Science |
Main results:
In order to detect estrus and animal behavior, our solution uses sensors mounted on cows and connected to our cloud services platform providing a unique approach to estrus detection leveraging deep learning, life-time data storage and FIWARE integration to enable new services based on sensor networks. Aforementioned sensor system and cloud services platform were developed within the Happy Cow project. An experiment was conducted on life stock in Denmark to train and validate existing and newly developed algorithms for detection of animal behavior (e.g. rumination, walking and eating activities). Life trials were ran on multiple farms in the Netherlands to train and validate probabilistic models that detect estrus successfully.
Exploitation:
The results of the applied research in the Happy Cow project are used in Ida, a commercially available health and activity tracker for dairy cows that is available to dairy farmers since 2017 via Connecterra and partners. The product currently offers estrus detection, health and feed alerts. As of today, Ida is used by dairy farmers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Pakistan and Canada. The commercially available hardware for Ida is designed and assembled in the Netherlands.
Dissemination:
There is a web based application available for end users (i.e. primarily dairy farmers) to get insights regarding their cows created by Ida. This application can be used on desktop computers and mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. Other stakeholders can get tailored reports via our website that report on e.g. specific trends or performance indicators. The data of a farmer is not shared with third partners (e.g. veterinarians or animal feed manufacturers) without permission and the farmer remains ownership of its data.
Illustrations:
Approved:
1
Proposal summary:
Happy Cow developed hardware and software for a cloud-based estrus detection system for dairy farms, with special focus on organic dairy farms. Our approach is based from the perspective of the internet of things leveraging the FIWARE platform. Increased cost of production and abolishment of the quota system will put pressure on dairy farmers to find new ways to optimize their farm production. Estrus detection is one of the fundamental optimization points in operations and can save farmers significant amounts of money. While current detection systems provide adequate accuracy, they are mostly based on algorithms designed for indoor farms and costly monolithic implementations. Happy Cow is targeting its scalable, adaptive system for indoor and free grazing cows at farms of any scale.