Publications

Robotic Milking

From 1989 Silsoe Research Institute  developed robotic milking techniques which led in turn to the deLaval VMS system.  The project established the motivation of cows to enter the system, how to attach teat cups and what the next stage of work would be in monitoring cow health and fertility.

Automated health monitoring

Once it was clear that robotic milking could be made to work it became important to determine how we could monitor the cow health which has been monitored by humans by senses and learned skills since the stone age.  What should we monitor and how could we do it ?  I focussed my efforts on milk and breath analysis for nutritional management, particularly ketosis, without much success, due to the power of homoeostasis to correct for imbalances and lower the cow's output to match input. However, the projects led on to the development of technologies for monitoring methane emissions from cows.

Automatic Ovulation Detection

The most expensive problem facing dairy farmers is the failure to detect ovulation and to get cows pregnant.  Since the 1970s we have known that measuring progesterone in milk will enable us to detect ovulation, infertility and pregnancy.  In the late 1990s Toby Mottram led a project to develop an on-line biosensor to measure progesterone in milk.  A video of the system is here and papers showing how the system worked.  Unfortunately the last Government did not see the benefit of practical agricultural research and closed the Institute before we could develop a commercial prototype.

Behavioural Monitoring Collars

About 30 years ago collars were introduced to carry the original bulky RFID tags and could also be used with mercury switches to detect movement and thus the gross change in movements associated with oestrus. Detecting oestrus has been a key requirement on dairy farms ever since the introduction of Artificial Insemination placed the onus on detecting oestrus (or heat) on the farm staff.

This revolution is ongoing and eCow is central to the development of new algorithms to detect various health parameters. The engineering principles for cow monitoring with collars were demonstrated in papers presented by Toby Mottram at the ASABE meeting in 2008 at Providence Rhode Island.