Bovine Respiratory Disease costs the UK agricultural industry £80 million per year due to cow death, veterinary fees, additional labor, and decreased animal output. However, a new effort intends to provide automated and real-time monitoring to offer dairy producers with an early warning system.
Scotland’s Rural College, the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH), Roboscientific, Zoetis, and Ritchie are all involved in the DETECT project.
UKCEH scientists will collect breath samples from both healthy and BRD-positive animals. They will next utilize a chemical ionisation mass spectrometer to determine which volatile metabolites are linked to healthy or unhealthy animals.
This will help in the development of low-cost sensors that will be placed into mechanical calf feeders to monitor animals’ breath while they feed. Electronic ear tags enable test findings to be associated with individual animals.
Non-invasive BVD monitoring
This non-invasive passive monitoring device is a novel approach since previous methods for obtaining a breath sample entailed animal handling, such as using nose swabs or attaching a mask to specific animals.
‘Passive breath monitoring of livestock: utilizing factor analysis to deconvolve the cow shed,’ a UKCEH research published last year in the Journal of Breath Research, demonstrated the strategy may work.
“Reducing the impact of disease in calves will improve the animals’ welfare and productivity, as well as saving farmers money and time,” said Dr Ben Langford of UKCEH, who conducted the research and is part of the DETECT project team. It would also minimize the usage of antibiotics, which would aid in the fight against antimicrobial resistance, a major concern in the agricultural industry.”
Respiratory sickness, which is sometimes difficult to detect physically, causes animals to gain weight more slowly and cows to produce less milk. Beef cattle take longer to attain market weights, and afflicted animals’ feed and vet expenditures are greater.
Roboscientific designed the new sensors, which will be tested on six large dairy farms. The goal is to develop a commercial monitoring system that would notify farmers via text message when a sick animal is found. This would enable the farmer to promptly isolate that animal and prevent illness from spreading across the herd.
It will be intended to be easily installed into any calf shed to enable customizable, automated, and real-time illness monitoring of individual animals.
The project was one of 19 winning Farming Futures Automation and Robotics competition ideas that won a £700,000 grant from Innovate UK.
