Innovative technology to be trialled on-farm will help with animal health and welfare.
A new automated monitoring system designed for the early detection of lameness among dairy herds will be piloted on 50 New Zealand farms this season.
Its creators, Dunedin company Iris Data Science had the system on display in the innovations marquee at Fieldays, where it was oversubscribed as eager farmers signed up to be part of the pilot.
“We’re really pleased; we were not sure what the reception was going to be like,” Iris Data Science’s co-founder and managing director Greg Peyroux says.
Feedback from those farmers will then be used if it needs to be tweaked before commercial release.
The pilot follows the system’s initial successful trial on five South Island dairy farms.
Called OmniEye Locomotion, it uses an on-farm camera mounted on a farm’s exit race, which collects tens of thousands of data points from every cow as it exits the milking shed.
Using AI, a computer then identifies each cow and gives it a locomotion score based on DairyNZ guidelines for lameness scoring.
The data is then displayed on a dashboard for the farmer to see. It uses a traffic light system to indicate whether the cow has a potential foot issue, with red being an obvious problem, orange being a warning and green being healthy.
“It’s all about early detection. If you get in early, you can reduce the cost massively,” he says.
Farmers receive real-time information that they can action by either automatically or manually drafting cows that need treatment, allowing for remote diagnostics for livestock by a vet.
Another product in the system – OmniEye Diary – gives visual verification of an animal’s condition over time to provide better understanding of the herd’s health.
The software was originally designed for facial recognition in the sheep industry. However, Peyroux says they soon realised there was not a huge market for the product because NZ’s outdoor farming system meant the farmer seldom saw each individual sheep.
But farmers see their dairy cows much more frequently. He spent most of last year’s lockdown ringing people to get feedback on how the technology could be best used in the dairy industry.
“The clear winner was lameness,” he says.
“We understand lameness is a huge issue for farmers in New Zealand, costing thousands of dollars each year through a loss of production and is also a major animal welfare issue.”
He hoped to have the technology installed on the farms by September and the pilot to get underway.
Peyroux says installing the system has a one-off $5000 cost and a $1 per cow per month cost to help pay for the data storage costs during the milking season.
The Ministry for Primary Industries is contributing $40,000 to the project through its Sustainable Food and Fibre Futures fund.
MPI’s director investment programmes Steve Penno says this new innovation could help improve important animal welfare outcomes.
“Finding an easy solution for farmers to detect lameness early on in their herd provides a huge benefit as they’ll be able to identify and treat the issue before it reaches a critical point,” Penno says.
