WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – A group of Purdue College researchers has obtained a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to enhance feed effectivity and consistency on dairy farms through the use of automated video analytics techniques. The grant is amongst $9.6 million in latest NIFA investments supporting 12 tasks in animal innovation techniques.
“Feed prices are the No. 1 price for dairy farmers. In an effort to make enhancements on feed effectivity, we have now to offer suggestions to farmers near in actual time,” stated Jacquelyn Boerman, affiliate professor of animal sciences. “If we are able to enhance the consistency of that feed and we all know what particular person cows are consuming, we’re going to handle that feed higher. That has financial implications for dairy farmers.”
The dairy business goals to grow to be carbon impartial by 2050 by way of varied approaches, together with modifying the setting of the cow rumen and managing manure to cut back methane emissions. Boerman’s group will concentrate on enhancing dairy cow effectivity by offering them with constant feed and measuring how a lot they eat.
A cattle nutritionist, Boerman will assess feed composition for consistency, which improves their milk manufacturing. Amy Reibman, the Elmore Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will deal with the video recording logistics and information analytics.
Feed ranks as the best price in dairy farming. A group of Purdue College researchers will use video analytics techniques to discover find out how to enhance feed effectivity with a $1 million grant from the USDA Nationwide Institute of Meals and Agriculture. (Purdue College photograph/Tom Campbell)
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Dennis Buckmaster, professor of agriculture and biological engineering, will combine the info with software program techniques that may measure motion, temperature, water consumption, rumination and milk-production information from cows. Linda Pfeiffer, affiliate professor of agricultural sciences education and communication, heads the undertaking’s social sciences group, which is able to work with stakeholders to higher perceive how they will combine the video know-how into their operations.
The researchers will perform the preliminary testing section primarily on the Purdue Dairy Unit. “We hope that it’s going to have functions for industrial farms afterward,” Boerman stated. The undertaking has letters of help from the Indiana Dairy Producers and from farm vitamin firms.
The collaboration started with an inner 2022 proposal that led to funding a undertaking between college members within the Faculty of Agriculture and the Faculty of Engineering. The brand new undertaking additionally extends the work of Matthew Rogers, who obtained a doctorate in agricultural and organic engineering from Purdue in 2022. Rogers used stereovision to measure the quantity of granular agricultural supplies.
If profitable, the undertaking will make it attainable to measure feed consumption on a per-animal foundation in group settings. “Up to now, we have now solely measured output per animal and have inputs aggregated per group,” stated Buckmaster, who can be the Dean’s Fellow for Digital Agriculture.
Buckmaster is worked up to mix early profession work on forages, feeding, complete blended ration (TMR) for dairy cows, and particle measurement together with his more moderen work in digital architectural information pipelines.
“The flexibility to know that every batch is uniformly blended with out tremendously tedious and costly sampling may even be of nice worth in TMR conditions,” he stated. His function will embody helping with the TMR uniformity experiments and feed characterization.
“I count on there shall be some evaluation and modeling wanted to go from uncooked bulk quantity measurements to per-animal consumption, too. That may contain density and moisture content material features in addition to appropriately dividing feed disappearance when cows are facet by facet,” he stated.
The undertaking’s video analytics element shall be designed to reinforce understanding of the visible information that farmers depend on for decision-making.
Purdue College researchers will conduct preliminary analysis on bettering feed and dairy cow effectivity on the Purdue Dairy Unit. Additional analysis will proceed in cooperation with operational industrial farms.
(Purdue College photograph/Tom Campbell)
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“Farmers are educated to make plenty of choices based mostly on issues that they see,” stated Reibman, who focuses on video analytics for animals. “I’m an engineer. I wish to clear up issues. We should always be capable to design a system that may increase their skills.
“We want the system to be efficient in an operational farm, and operational farms typically have harsh visible environments: dangerous lighting, mud. I name it shmutz within the air that will get in your cameras.”
The group’s guiding ideas are to acquire the info they want with placement of cameras and different gear that dairy farmers won’t should work round.
“This notion that ‘it has to work the way in which it’s’ as an alternative of ‘can we modify the setting in order that it’ll work’ is fascinating to me,” Reibman stated.
Pfeiffer, who leads the undertaking’s social science group, focuses on upstream, dialogic and coproduction communication fashions. “Which means we’re engaged upstream in analysis because the know-how is being designed,” Pfeiffer stated. “And coproduction implies that we’re taking suggestions from stakeholders.”
For this undertaking, farmers, nutritionists, veterinarians and business representatives will share suggestions with the engineers and the scientists as they’re designing these digital camera techniques to enhance feed effectivity.
“We’re often seeing applied sciences which can be being developed to enhance life typically introduce prices, dangers and challenges to the top person that aren’t typically anticipated,” Pfeiffer stated. And that can lead to resistance to the applied sciences.
The social science group additionally consists of professor Mark Tucker and PhD candidate Rob Weiner, each within the Division of Agricultural Sciences Schooling and Communication.
Author: Steve Koppes
Media contact: Maureen Manier, mmanier@purdue.edu
Sources: Jacquelyn Boerman, jboerma@purdue.edu; Dennis Buckmaster, dbuckmas@purdue.edu; Linda Pfeiffer, lpfeiff@purdue.edu; Amy Reibman, reibman@purdue.edu.
Agricultural Communications: 765-494-8415;
Maureen Manier, Division Head, mmanier@purdue.edu
