Abstract #318

# 318
Precision dairy economics.
C. Kamphuis*2, H. Hogeveen1,3, M. van der Voort1, 1Business Economics Group, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands, 2Animal Breeding and Gernomics, Wageningen University and Research, Wageningen, the Netherlands, 3Department of Farm Animal Health, Faculty of Veterinary Health, Utrecht University, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Precision dairy technologies are technologies that collect data by monitoring physiological, behavioral, or production indicators related to health or fertility of individual cows (e.g., automated detection of estrus, mastitis, or lameness). Goals of these technologies are to support management, improve animal health and welfare, and increase profitability. Demands for these technologies are rising, driven by increasing farm management complexity, availability of cheaper technologies, and societal concerns around animal health and welfare. Despite the rising demand, to date adoption of most sensor technologies have been modest. For instance, attempts to automate lameness detection involve automated gait analysis, such as force platforms, 3D-accelerometers or image-based technologies. However, adoption is low since most of these technologies are not (yet) ready to function under practical circumstances. Moreover, there are uncertainties on what exactly needs to be monitored, and what action is required once an alert for lameness is generated. This lack of knowledge inhibits economic calculations on these technologies. Similar adoption issues are seen with clinical mastitis detection in conventional milking parlors. The monitored indicators are proxy measures for clinical mastitis, resulting in suboptimal detection performance (too many cases are missed, and too many false alerts are generated). Also, technical failures are common, and investment costs can be significant. These shortcomings led to the conclusion that investing in automated mastitis detection systems was not profitable for an average-sized pasture-grazed New Zealand farm. The aforementioned examples deduct essential criteria to ensure adoption of precision dairy technologies: indicators have to be associated with events of interest, it should be clear what exactly has to be monitored, reflecting farmers’ needs, and this in turn has to be associated with a clear (autonomous) management action. A positive economic benefit will further fuel adoption, but is not crucial. These criteria are all met by estrus detection systems, and thus, it should be no surprise that these are one of the most successful precision dairy technologies today?

Key Words: sensor technologies, economic value, adoption criteria

Speaker Bio
Claudia Kamphuis is from Oldenzaal, the Netherlands. She received her MSc on Preventive Animal Health and Welfare from Wageningen University in 2004. Her PhD work, with Dr. Henk Hogeveen as her supervisor, started in 2006 at Utrecht University and focused on the application of data mining techniques to analyse sensor measurements from milking robots to detect clinical mastitis. After finishing her PhD in 2010, she and her family moved to New Zealand where she started as scientist at DairyNZ. Here, her focus continued to be on automated detection of health or fertility events. When she moved back to the Netherlands in 2013, she started at Business Economics, Wageningen University, where she collaborated in (inter)national studies determining the social and economic value of precision farming technologies. Currently, she works at Wageningen University & Research Animal Breeding and Genomics, where she broadens her scope with Big Data Analytics.