Automated measurement of milk yield in suckler cows - INRAE - Institut national de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement
Conference Poster Year : 2024

Automated measurement of milk yield in suckler cows

Abstract

The productivity of suckler cow farms depends on the number of calves weaned per cow and of their weights at weaning, as these are the criteria used for selling them. To ensure calf weight gain, supplementation with concentrates has become the preferred method, therefore, it is essential to maintain and develop the dairy potential of suckler cows (SC) to reduce feed costs. The aim of this project is to develop a validated reference model for predicting milk production (MP) in SC. The standard method for quantifying MP involves weighing the calf before and after suckling. This method is time-consuming and requires significant manpower, and is therefore only used in a few experimental stations. The development of automated weighing and electronic animal identification has led to the emergence of an alternative method that could become the reference. The concept is to allow the calf to suckle its mother freely, with a compulsory weighting between its pen and mother one. The software processes the weights collected automatically to estimate MP. INRAE’s Herbipôle unit designed and tested a prototype 7 winters on 117 cows, 71 Charolais (CH) and 46 Salers (SA). Each winter was divided in 6 periods of 14 days. Each period alternated between 4 days of standard method (2 sucklings/day) and 10 days of free suckling with the device based on automatic weighing at each pen change. An algorithm transform calf weights into MP. The calves suckled 3.1 ± 1.5 times/day during the first period compared to 4.5 ± 1.7 during the last. The free device estimated that MP was 8.3 ± 2.1 kg/d for SA, 6.9 ± 1.3 for CH, with a good correlation with the reference method (r² from 0.86 to 0.66 from period 1 to 6). The free device has been validated and will be extended to various suckler cattle experimental stations to measure MP of other breeds in various breeding conditions.
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Dates and versions

hal-04753130 , version 1 (25-10-2024)

Identifiers

  • HAL Id : hal-04753130 , version 1

Cite

Bernard Sepchat, Marc Barbet. Automated measurement of milk yield in suckler cows. 75. Annual Meeting of the European Federation of Animal Science, Jan 2024, Florence, Italy. Wageningen Academic Publishers, Annual Meeting of the European Association for Animal production, 34, pp.558, Book of Abstracts of the 75th Annual Meeting of the European Federation of Animal Science. ⟨hal-04753130⟩
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