News

Toby talks about greenhouse gase projects at BCVA

In his role as Defra’s Coordinator for the Agricultural Greenhouse Gas R & D Platform Toby Mottram gave a paper at the Annual Congress of the British Cattle Veterinary Association in Southport on 26th November. Defra has made an investment of £12.6 m to improve to the best standard, as agreed under the Kyoto Treaty, our current inventory of methane and nitrous oxide from livestock and croplands, his slides Accounting for the UK’s Greenhouse Gases are here. Until the inventory work is completed in 2015 it will be hard to advise the best whole farm strategies for reducing our farm impact on the environment.  It was good to meet friends such as Professor Jude Capper doing great work in the USA.

eCow opens new design studio in Exeter

eCow is inviting neighbours and friends to coffee and a presentation of the plans for expansion within the Innovation Centre at Exeter University.  Come and visit us and talk about how we make things and what we can do with the data. This is an Open Invitation to friends and neighbours in the reception area of the Innovation Centre at 10.30 on 8th November 2011, followed by a presentation and a visit to the facility.

eCow demonstrates the new three channel rumen bolus

eCow will be demonstrating the new three channel rumen bolus and our ability to design state of the art monitoring systems for bovines at a Defra sponsored Global Research Alliance meeting at CEDAR University of Reading on the 31st October 2011

The meeting will focus on the available techniques for monitoring methane and nitrous oxide emissions from agricultural sources that make up 8% of the UK’s total CO2. Come and talk to us about your needs for research equipment for example modelling methane emissions with the combination of methane and redox data that our new bolus provides.

For other information visit GHG Research Platform.

Jobs at eCow

Three part time jobs are available at our Studio.  If you want more details contact toby@ecow.co.uk.
These posts have now been filled!

eCow contributes to Veterinary Record The potential for using RFID technology to do more than track animals has rarely been properly explored.  In this scientific commentary on implanted transponders I draw attention to our ongoing work on lameness by measuring TOP.  Look out for the paper by Bell et al.

See the Rumen Analyzer at ADSA ASAS JAM in New Orleans

I am at the ADSA conference from Sunday until Tuesday 12th July mostly to look at some of the new science but I do have a Rumen Analyser with me and I can show how simple and reliable it is for calibrating.  I am staying the Marriott Conventional Center hotel across the road from the Ernest N. Morial Center Hall B doors email me toby@ecow.co.uk or give me a call.

Can a bolus detect methane emissions ?

One way of sampling cow breath

Some authors have suggested that a bolus can be used to measure methane either in the headspace (McSweeney,CSIRO) or in solution (Laporte-Uribe & Gibbs, 2009).  My opinion is that this may be possible in a fistulated animal because the power requirements of methane sensors are high and the location will be critical.  A bolus can have as much as 2000 mAh power from modern batteries but as methane sensors draw about 200 mA the batteries would be exhausted in less than 12 hours.

Whilst the fistulated cow is a useful research tool the future has to lie in developing instrumentation tools for intact animals.  At eCow we are looking for partners to pioneer a new range of bolus systems designed for the intact animal and useable by veterinarians and farmers.

We are particularly keen to link up with organisations that want to develop rumen models based on what is measureable with a bolus located in the rumen reticulum.  Our boluses are designed to go to the rumen reticulum and stay there.

History of the rumen pH bolus

I invented the first rumen bolus in 2003 for a major biotechnology company who wanted to test the efficacy of a rumen modifying product.  Because of the confidentiality clauses we could not talk about that until friends at the University of Brisbane used some old prototypes after the end of the project, the results were published  as Continuous monitoring of ruminal pH using wireless telemetry and in more detail Philips et al, pH Telemetry.

However, my experience with that design led me to realise that something was fundamentally wrong with our way of using the glass electrode sensor.  These are very reliable and industrially proven over a number of decades in very tough environments so why did they fail ?  It was because we did not control orientation.  These sensors have air trapped inside them and when inverted the air seeps out through the reference junction and rumen liquor seeps in.  By reshaping the bolus so that the sensor tip tends to point downward we completely avoid this problem and our pH sensors stay within 0.3 pH units for 90 days.  We also found a way to extend battery life by using a temperature sensor as an interlock for radio transmission.  The bolus only operates when the temperature is above 30C which is when it is being calibrated on the bench or inside a cow.  We patented these ideas in 2007.

Developing the TOP lameness analyser

Holstein Cow at Grass

Lameness is a major problem in modern dairy farms.  To manage the problem and identify techniques that reduce lameness to a minimum some farmers are required by their customers to provide frequent reports on the mobility scores of their milking animals.

The typical approach to screening for lameness involves watching every cow take at least three purposeful, unimpeded strides and a turn. Cows are then allocated a score based on the observation of a set of five key behaviours associated with lameness; namely even weight bearing, even rhythm of walking, stride length, posture and speed of locomotion . In the UK, DairyCo have published guidance for farmers looking to score their herds for mobility . The recommendation is that farmers should screen their herds regularly, ideally scoring at least monthly. However, the quality of this screening remains questionable given there are variations in the environment in which cows are scored, a clear view of each cow is not always achieved when groups are being moved, there are difficulties with identifying cows, intervals between scoring is longer than ideal for managing lameness and the intra- and inter-observer repeatability is a concern without training . The relatively insensitive and intermittent nature of the scoring means trends in lameness are more difficult to confidently identify at the individual and herd level.

Time consuming manual techniques for mobility scoring need to be enhanced by automation.  Mottram  & Bell Mobility Abstract 2010 showed that the time of passage of a cow walking under her own volition between two points could indicate with 70% accuracy the mobility score of dairy cows.  That study was conducted at a vet school farm on two occasions using a stop watch and had limited statistical strength.  The potential for using RFID ear tags and static portal antennas for measuring time of passage on a larger scale over an extended period of time was investigated in this study.  The hypothesis to be tested was that the time of passage of a cow with motivation to walk to feed between two points in the exit area of a milking parlour was a reliable indicator of mobility score over extended periods.

A commercial farm with cows in groups of up to eighty was selected within the mobility score monitoring scheme with regular veterinary mobility scoring.  The farm had cows marked with freeze brands on the rump and RFID ear tags (Allflex using Tiris RFID).  The cows left the milking parlour through a race way in which two ATL antennas were placed 5 metres apart.  Only one cow could pass through at a time.  The milking parlour was a herringbone system that the cows left in batches of 12 when released by the milker.  A loafing area between the parlour and the raceway permitted some overtaking of slow cows by the faster.  The work was conducted during the summer when cows were leaving the parlour to take supplementary forage at a feeding station about 30 metres beyond the second portal antenna.

When a cow was within a range of +/- 200 mm of each of the antennas her identity was transmitted to a computer which maintained a log of her time passing under each antenna and from which the time difference was easily computed.  The data file created was transmitted by internet every night to the experimenters so that no visits were necessary to the farm except for maintenance.  A web cam was installed to enable the passage of the cows to be monitored without interference.

Only the first appearance of a cow in a milking session was used for analysis.  Subsequent appearances at the antenna were due to supervised cow movements for AI, veterinary treatments etc and so were not made at the cows natural speed.  Where a cow with a time of passage greater than the mean time + standard deviation passed through the system the times of the cows following her were discarded until the gap between cows was greater than the longest time of passage recorded (30 s).

For each cow a list was compiled of the times of passage.   Every week these data were analysed to determine mean, minimum and maximum for each cow.   The first four weeks were used to allow the cows to get used to the extra portal antenna and to conduct a comparison between the scores of the veterinarian with those created by combining the canonical variant analysis of the mean, minimum and maximum of the times of passage.

The canonical variant analysis identified that the minimum and mean contained all the information needed to classify the cows to mobility score groups.  The cause of  maximum time variation were examined by observing the passage of the cows with the webcam these were more influenced by events unrelated to lameness such as agonistic interactions and congestion in front of the cow also some cows stopped for grooming.

The data were analysed and will be presented in a paper soon.