Electronic procedures of animal marking and identification as well as the construction of comprehensive management information systems (datanetworkand expert-systems) under standardized conditions, can achieve a considerable contribution to using rationalization reserves in agriculture processing. Socio-political demands can be fulfilled more efficiently with regard to an adapted animal keeping...

Inbreeding depression is a harmful phenomenon in livestock which is outcome of inbreeding. Inbreeding is consequence mating between two individuals who are more related to each other than average relatedness in population, which results in reducing in fitness of progenies and genetic variability in populations. Development of high-density genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array f...

Farm assurance schemes are an inevitable and essential part of the UK livestock industries as they provide valuable assurances to the market over food safety, nonhuman animal welfare, and environmental concerns. However, there is potential for welfare assessment within such schemes to extend beyond existing resource-based parameters to include outcome-based observations of the behavior and phys...

The industrialization of animal agriculture has fundamentally transformed animal health markets while animal health innovations have promoted this industrialization. The subtlety of these interactions shows how little we know about agricultural industrialization. To illustrate, we consider three stylized features of industrialized animal agriculture. These are the closing off of production acti...

Meta-analysis is increasingly utilised in the understanding of consumer behaviour, including in relation to farm animal welfare. However, the issue of publication bias has received little attention. As willingness-to-pay (WTP) is widely used in policy, it is important to explore publication bias. This research aimed to evaluate publication bias in WTP, specifically public WTP for farm animal we...

Rosemarie Weikard, Elisabeth Altmaier, Karsten Suhre, Klaus M. Weinberger, Harald M. Hammon, Elke Albrecht, Kouji Setoguchi, Akiko Takasuga, and Christa Kühn Research Unit Molecular Biology, Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN), Dummerstorf; Institute of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Neuherberg, Germany; Biocrates Life Sciences Aktiengesellschaft, Inn...

in pasture-based milk production systems, using available farm resources in order to reduce feeding costs, the composition and functional properties of dairy cows’ milk are of considerable importance to the dairy farmer, manufacturer and consumer. basically, there are three options for altering the composition and/or functional properties of milk: 1) cow nutrition and grazing management, 2) cow...

Animal welfare is of multi-dimensional nature, and its assessment should be based on a variety of measures. Traditionally, farm animal welfare assessment has focused on ‚inputs’ such as resources and management practices provided to the animals. Especially during the last decade, however, the use of animal-based ‚outcome’ measures has been advocated since they are considered to directly reflect...