The digitalisation of agriculture facilitates the collection of data from dairy farmers. This in turn, allows initiatives such as Gigacow, creating an infrastructure for research on precision dairy farming that will help to strengthen Swedish farming and milk production.
Gigacow is organised by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). By creating a platform for data collection, Gigacow facilitates the exchange between researchers and farmers in the areas of precision dairy farming and genetics.
The testbed has built a platform for data collection from commercial dairy farms. Moreover, the platform is used as a base for projects where new sensors or cameras are connected. Gigacow collect data from 10 dairy farms and will expand as more management systems are being connected to Gigacow. The testbed pays for genomic breeding assessment for the animals that are part of the network. This knowledge is supplemented through automated collection of animal characteristics, feed intake, diseases and other relevant information about the animals’ living conditions.
“Gigacow is designed to continuously collect data from dairy farms. This means that you can be sure that there is information covering the work of the dairy farm before, during and after the study period. Additionally, you can often avoid having to set up your own experiments or networks and instead focus on interpreting and processing already collected data.” says Tomas Klingström, PhD and coordinator of Gigacow.
As part of facilitating the exchange between researchers and farmers, the collected data and the conclusions are being made available to participants in the project.
Some projects supported by SLU Gigacow are:
From sensitive to robust athlete
SLU Gigacow has performed method validation for using weather data from the Swedish meterological institute and combine this data with on-farm measurements on milk production and health. On some farms Hobo temperature loggers have also been installed to study the relationship between outdoor temperature and temperature within different parts of the barn.
Calm as a cow – breeding for improved temperament in dairy cattle
Temperament as a trait in breeding is currently recorded by manual observation. The project is a collaboration between SLU and Växa Sweden to better define the family of traits and find ways to automate their measurement.
Reducing methane emissions by breeding
SLU Gigacow and Växa Sweden are members of the Global methane hub project and install “sniffers” for recording methane gas emissions from cows. By combining this with feed data and milk production from SLU Gigacow we can include Swedish breeds and farm management practices in the international work on breeding to reduce methane emissions.
Nordic Testbed Network and the Knowledgehub for digitalization of agriculture
In addition to the above projects SLU Gigacow and collaborating researchers have supported the installation of Växa Control positioning on one farm, are testing Anicare activity monitors for dairy on a second farm and are currently partnered with Haldrones AB to evaluate applications for drones in dairy farms.
Contact:
Tomas Klingström
tomas.klingstrom@slu.se