Grants and Contracts Details
Description
Good animal welfare is paramount to the dairy industry, including producers, processors,
distributors, and cooperatives. The development of a new, accurate, and remote welfare assessment
benchmark using validated multi-variable precision dairy technologies (PDTs) has the potential to
increase the sustainability of the dairy industry in the future. PDTs allow for real-time,
continuous recording of animal behavior and other animal-based outcomes at the individual animal
level. Before these technologies can be useful in assessing animal welfare, predictive models and
validations must first be done. Additionally, although technology may be useful to identify animal
welfare concerns on-farm, dairy producers must be willing to adopt these technologies, see value
and trust in these tools, and make sense of the data. Concurrently, there is a risk that investment
in and adoption of novel technologies may be futile if these technologies are ultimately rejected
by society. Therefore, the public must be engaged to establish which aspects of these technologies
may generate social acceptance or concern. Thus, our proposed integrated research and extension
project aims to bridge the use of PDTs with the social aspects of animal welfare. We will develop
models and validate the use of multiple, integrated technologies to predict common animal welfare
assessment outcomes that can be monitored remotely while simultaneously engaging dairy producer and
the public in two-way conversations about the role of these technologies on-farm. Our
multidisciplinary project will integrate scientific assessments of animal welfare, artificial
intelligence, machine learning, dairy production knowledge, and social science to provide practical
recommendations for the sustainable
use of PDT on-farm.
Status | Finished |
---|---|
Effective start/end date | 6/1/21 → 3/2/23 |
Funding
- National Institute of Food and Agriculture: $1,000,000.00
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