A Sensor-Based Forage Monitoring of Grazing Cattle in Dairy Farming

Cereal forage for dairy cattle

represents considerable thrips pressure. We present the data from yellow traps only to show that many thrips were present in the greenhouse throughout the trial. In the absence of predators, the number of thrips per plant increased consistently throughout the trial to reach 39.28 per plant in the final week (table 1). All treatments significantly reduced thrips numbers (P < 0.05) compared to th...

Wireless Sensor Networks in Agriculture: Cattle Monitoring for Farming Industries

This paper investigates an adaptation of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to cattle monitoring application. The proposed solution facilitates a desired requirement of continuously assessing the condition of individual animal, aggregating and reporting these data to the farm manager. There are several existing approaches to animal monitoring, from using a store and forward mechanisms to employing...

Dairy Cattle Must Have Good Forage

Fiber Digestibility and Forage Fragility in Dairy Cattle

Mertens (1997) defined physically effective NDF (peNDF) as the fraction of NDF that stimulated chewing and contributed to a ruminal digesta mat. He also proposed a standard laboratory method for measuring peNDF that involved dry sieving and measuring the fraction of sample NDF retained on the ≥1.18-mm sieve. This large particle pool requires rumination and has a high resistance to escape from t...

Influence of supplementation method on forage use and grazing behavior by beef cattle grazing bluestem range.

Two 25-d trials (late summer and early winter) were conducted to determine the influence of supplementation method on forage use and grazing behavior. Fifteen ruminally and 12 esophageally fistulated steers (316 and 400 kg, respectively) were blocked by weight and assigned randomly to one of three treatments: 1) self-feeding supplement (via Calan gates) with salt as a limiting agent; 2) daily h...