The main aim of animal welfare research

The primary goal of organic, pasture-based livestock farming is to ensure animal welfare and prevent diseases. This is closely linked to production efficiency, as only healthy animals in good condition can produce high-quality and sufficient amounts of food. The latest technology in digital tools enables the health monitoring of individual animals, detecting early disease symptoms and thus allowing a fast-response intervention. The lack of human resources in agriculture increases the difficulty of daily monitoring animals on the pasture. As a result, farmers often detect animal health problems too late. Animal diseases presented with clinical signs can result in significant production losses (or even death), negatively affect animal welfare, and increase the use of pharmaceutical products that will eventually lead to a significant financial cost. This is particularly true for high-value breeding animals.

Activities

Our on-farm research is carried out on a large group of animals, with the active participation of farmers:

  • The potential use of digital sensors designed for dairy cows in grazing beef cattle herds
  • Monitoring of rumination time and activity levels, detection and controlling health problems, and preparing professional daily reports
  • Assisting farmers in accessing, interpreting, and analysing information from sensor software
  • Analysing raw sensor data to discover new relationships between animal behaviour and sensor data.

Expected results

  • Disease prevention by identifying and reducing environmental factors and stressors that predispose animals to illness and providing timely treatments based on the analysis of physiological data from sensors
  • Recovery monitoring of treated animals
  • A novel and practical connection between sensor data and animal behaviour.

Contact person

Dr. Márton Aliz

Dr. Aliz Márton

Head of animal husbandry team
Degree in agricultural engineering, PhD

MNVH

The implementation of the research is supported by Hungarian National Rural Network (MNVH): www.videkihalozat.eu

Related research

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