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The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) strives to develop new methodologies (quantitative and qualitative) for assessing animal welfare of food-producing animals by 2027 and start collecting standardised and good quality animal welfare (AW) data by 2030. In light of its vision, EFSA identified the need to develop an action Roadmap for the More Welfare project: towards new risk assessment methodologies and harmonised animal welfare data in the EU. This Roadmap maps existing animal welfare assessment methods, tools, and data collection activities for different species of food-producing animals through literature review, desk research, online surveys, and workshops. It identifies data and knowledge gaps as well as challenges and blockers prevalent in AW assessment. In doing so, the roadmap points towards research areas that require further development (i.e., working areas), but also highlights collaboration opportunities and priority strategies (actions and project proposals) necessary for achieving EFSA's vision. Seven working areas for animal welfare assessment were identified and discussed with EFSA and external AW experts during virtual workshops, touching upon the definition of animal welfare, indicators and tools for welfare assessment, and the development of frameworks to assess and/or prioritise animal welfare issues. Finally, the Roadmap formulates five project proposals, each of them presenting high-level recommendations on multi-annual and multi-partner projects that were identified in collaboration with EFSA and AW experts, each supported by a SWOT analysis.

Lameness in dairy cattle is a costly and highly prevalent problem that impacts all aspects of sustainable dairy production, including animal welfare. Automation of gait assessment would allow monitoring of locomotion in which the cows' walking pattern can be evaluated frequently and with limited labor. With the right interpretation algorithms, this could result in more timely detection of locomotion problems. This in turn would facilitate timely intervention and early treatment which is crucial to reduce the impact of abnormal behavior and pain on animal welfare. Gait features of dairy cows can potentially be derived from key points that locate crucial anatomical points on a cows' body. The aim of this study is 2-fold: (1) demonstrate automation of the detection of dairy cows' key points in a practical indoor setting with natural occlusions from gates and races, and (2) propose the necessary steps to post process these key points to make them suitable for subsequent gait feature calculations. Both the automated detection of key points as well as the post-processing of them are crucial prerequisites for camera-based automated locomotion monitoring in a real farm environment. Side-view video footage of 34 Holstein Friesian dairy cows, captured when exiting the milking parlor, were used for model development. From these videos, 758 samples of 2 successive frames were extracted. A previously developed deep learning model called T-LEAP was trained to detect 17 key points on cows in our indoor farm environment with natural occlusions. To this end, the data set of 758 samples was randomly split into a train (n = 22 cows; no. of samples = 388), validation (n = 7 cows; no. of samples = 108), and test data set (n = 15 cows; no. of samples = 262). The performance of T-LEAP to automatically assign key points in our indoor situation was assessed using the average percentage of correctly detected key points using a threshold of 0.2 of the head length (PCKh@0.2). The model's perfo

Digital agriculture offers opportunities for improved monitoring and precision phenotyping of farm animals, crucial to achieving a more sustainable livestock production sector. Video-based analysis enables the quantification of animal behaviour in a non-invasive, automated way with few sensors. To unlock its full potential, appropriate computer vision techniques are needed. In this study, we propose an algorithm to detect lying-down and standing-up behaviour in dairy cows based on changes in bounding box properties detected via YOLOv5 and tracked with DeepSORT. We analysed 86 videos with a standing-up or lying-down event. With different criteria applied to the bounding box time series, we could detect up to respectively 92.3 and 80% for standing-up and lying-down events, respectively, with an accuracy of less than 2 seconds. Using bounding box properties as proxy for body shape and location, a general cow detection algorithm can serve multiple behavioural analyses simultaneously, whilst interpretability of the algorithms is maintained.

This study investigated the automated tracking of multiple cows simultaneously using computer vision and deep learning. Video clips were collected in 2019 at Dairy Campus, where cows were housed in small groups (n=16). A systematic approach covering the true variability of barn circumstances eventually resulted in the selection of 159 frames that were annotated by drawing bounding boxes around each cow. These frames were used to retrain and test four You Only Look Once version 5 (YOLOv5) models to automatically detect cows. The weights of the best performing YOLOv5 model were used to parametrize the deep learning algorithm DeepSORT to track multiple cows simultaneously. This algorithm was applied to a 10 min timeframe of a randomly selected video clip and evaluated by computing the multi-object tracking accuracy, which was 92.8%. This outcome is a promising and essential step towards automated monitoring of individual behaviour of group-housed cows.

This report details the activities carried out in 2019 in the KB DDHT project 8 “Exploring the potential of non-destructive and non-invasive sensor technologies in food supply chains”. It compiles all four deliverables of this project as a single narrative. There are five case studies at the core of this project which address animal welfare, indoor farming, inspection of fresh food products, personalized nutrition advise and food fraud detection. Multiple activities were planned in these case studies with main focus on sensor technologies for non-destructive and non-invasive sensing. One of the key activities was to conduct a survey of sensor technologies applicable and potentially suitable for each case study. In addition, for each case study, one or more experiments were conducted which involved data acquisition using novel sensors as well as building knowledge on data analysis of data from the new sensors. Furthermore, as one of the goal of this project is to explore new sensor technologies, it is expected that this project will generate valuable data. Therefore, focus was also on FAIR data sharing and management. A workshop was organized in collaboration with WDCC on this topic. Most of the case studies also aligned with OnePlanet Research centre, and as a result multiple experiments are in planning for 2020 in cooperation with OnePlanet.

A dairy cow's lifetime resilience and her ability to recalve gain importance on dairy farms, as they affect all aspects of the sustainability of the dairy industry. Many modern farms today have milk meters and activity sensors that accurately measure yield and activity at a high frequency for monitoring purposes. We hypothesized that these same sensors can be used for precision phenotyping of complex traits such as lifetime resilience or productive life span. The objective of this study was to investigate whether lifetime resilience and productive life span of dairy cows can be predicted using sensor-derived proxies of first-parity sensor data. We used a data set from 27 Belgian and British dairy farms with an automated milking system containing at least 5 yr of successive measurements. All of these farms had milk meter data available, and 13 of these farms were also equipped with activity sensors. This subset was used to investigate the added value of activity meters to improve the model's prediction accuracy. To rank cows for lifetime resilience, a score was attributed to each cow based on her number of calvings, her 305-d milk yield, her age at first calving, her calving intervals, and the DIM at the moment of culling, taking her entire lifetime into account. Next, this lifetime resilience score was used to rank the cows within their herd, resulting in a lifetime resilience ranking. Based on this ranking, cows were classified in a low (last third), moderate (middle third), or high (first third) resilience category within farm. In total, 45 biologically sound sensor features were defined from the time series data, including measures of variability, lactation curve shape, milk yield perturbations, activity spikes indicating estrous events, and activity dynamics representing health events (e.g., drops in daily activity). These features, calculated on first-lactation data, were used to predict the lifetime resilience rank and, thus, to predict the classification with

The objective of this review was to describe recent changes and expected developments in housing systems for dairy cows. These new developments should create an appropriate production environment for modern high-producing dairy cows and stimulate dairy farming-related developments in management, agro-technology, and equipment. Increased labor efficiency has been an important driver of the change from tie-stall barns to cubicle barns (also known as freestall barns). In future housing systems, the natural behavior of cows, climate control, emissions of ammonia and greenhouse gases, reuse of waste, manure quality, the aesthetics of buildings in the landscape, and capital efficiency are becoming increasingly important elements. To address future requirements, new concepts beyond cubicle barns must be developed. Freewalk housing systems; that is, loose housing systems without cubicles, would meet some of these future demands. These systems operate with composting bedding material or artificial permeable floors as lying and walking areas. However, these barns are still in development. Combinations of cubicle and freewalk housing systems, together with other techniques being developed, might become a major future housing system. Other techniques and systems that are being explored according to sustainability criteria include the multi-climate shed, the CowToilet (Hanskamp AgroTech, Doetinchem, the Netherlands) to separate feces and urine, and multifunctional buildings. These buildings and techniques can be part of land-based or, less commonly, city-based farming systems, such as floating farms.

Digestibility of nutrients in pig diets is an important component of overall feed efficiency. Targeted improvement of digestibility is currently mainly achieved by optimization of pig diets, based on information generated from digestibility trials that aim to establish fecal digestibility coefficients of different nutrients across a variety of ingredients. Genetic selection for nutrient digestibility is hampered by shortage of data on individual digestibility, but might help to further improve efficiency of pork production. The present study aimed to estimate the repeatability of fecal digestibility in pigs, as a first step to judge the perspectives for a breeding approach of nutrient digestibility. To achieve this, data was accumulated across nine digestibility trials, containing 1150 digestibility records of 416 growing pigs, measured across the trials. The data was analyzed with a model estimating variances for trial, diet, common litter, and individual animal effect for digestibility of Dry Matter, Ash, Organic Matter, Crude Protein, Crude fat and Non-Starch Polysaccharides. The factors diet and trial together explained the majority of the phenotypic variance, due to the design of the trials. Within diet and trial, common litter and individual animal effect contributed 0–10% of the phenotypic variance. The repeatability estimates ranged from 7% for Ash to 16% for Crude Protein, which suggests there may be genetic variation between pigs in digestibility. In conclusion, the repeatability estimates indicate it is worthwhile to collect phenotypic data that enable the estimation of genetic parameters for digestibility, if these data can be obtained at reasonable cost.

As input for the TEEBAgriFood study, TEEB asked for a series of studies on livestock, rice, palm oil, inland fisheries and agro-forestry. This report deals with livestock production and aims to improve decision-making in livestock production policies, to enhance its viability, not just economically but also socially and environmentally. Livestock sector is important because they have high externalities and it is expected that livestock consumption will be 76% higher in 2050 compared to 2005 (Alexandratos and Bruisma, 2012) because of population growth, income growth, urbanization and preference shifts. This report aims to provide evidence that will help to identify policy options for the transition towards increased food security with sustainable livestock production systems, with particular emphasis on the role of smallholder farmers.

A bedded pack barn is a different type of housing for dairy cows compared to the common free stall barns with cubicles and slatted concrete floors with slurry storage underneath (reference system). A bedded pack barn presumably has a different impact on the sustainability aspects economics, animal welfare, milk quality, manure quality and environment. In the present study we have investigated these sustainability aspects on 10 bedded pack barns in the Netherlands., Een vrijloopstal onderscheidt zich ten opzichte van een ligboxenstal doordat het geen ligboxen heeft en geen mestkelders onder de roostervloer (referentie systeem). Het liggedeelte is tevens de mestopslag. Een vrijloopstal heeft daardoor een andere impact op de duurzaamheidsaspecten: economie, welzijn, melkkwaliteit, mestkwaliteit en milieu. In deze studie zijn deze duurzaamheidsaspecten onderzocht op 10 praktijkbedrijven met een vrijloopstal in Nederland.

Het perspectief van de vrijloopstal wordt beoordeeld vanuit de gezichtspunten van de melkveehouder, de koe, het milieu en de burger. Deze onderdelen zijn op enkele of alle tien bedrijven onderzocht, dit verschilt per thema.

The bedded pack barn offers good perspective on animal welfare, animal health and public perception, but has disadvantages in terms of mineral management (nitrogen losses and fertilising value) and the presence of TAS (Thermophilic Aerobic Spore formers). Bedded packs with compost have a too high ammonia emission in the barn and lead to too high concentrations of TAS in sterile dairy products and therefore have no perspective. A controlled composting process with wood chips may have more future perspective. However, the availability and/or the price of wood chips can be a bottleneck if demand is increasing. The search for alternative TAS-poor bedding materials deserves continuation.

Het project “Animal Welfare Check Points” heeft als doel het ontwikkelen van protocollen voor het beoordelen van het welzijn van slachtdieren tijdens het selecteren en voorbereiden op het primaire bedrijf, tijdens transport en op de slachterij. In de tweede fase van het onderzoek (2013) zijn gegevens verzameld om een idee te krijgen van de gemiddelden en spreiding van de welzijnsparameters in de praktijk. Daarnaast zijn ervaringen opgedaan met de toepassing van de protocollen in de praktijk, en waar nodig zijn protocollen verder aangescherpt.

Een afname van zes procent levend geboren kalveren van vaarzen tussen 1995 en 2010 was aanleiding voor nieuw sectoronderzoek. Uit de inventarisatie blijkt dat naast bekende factoren als draagtijd en geboorteverloop de regio waar het bedrijf is gehuisvest en het seizoen van afkalven zorgen voor opmerkelijke verschillen in levensvatbaarheid van kalveren.

This report describes figures on animal health and welfare on three Dutch commercial dairy farms that house their cows in bedded pack barns. Moreover, some milk quality parameters and culling and replacement figures are reported., In dit rapport worden resultaten beschreven, wat betreft diergezondheid en -welzijn alsmede melkkwaliteit, van 3 Nederlandse praktijkbedrijven, die hun melkvee de laatste jaren huisvesten in nieuw gebouwde vrijloopstallen. De 3 bedrijven hebben gemeen dat de koeien kunnen liggen in een vrijloopruimte, maar het soort bodem en de stalopzet zijn verschillend. 2 bedrijven gebruiken compost als bodemmateriaal, het 3e bedrijf gebruikt houtsnippers die in de stal composteren.

Het Handboek Melkveehouderij is hét naslagwerk voor melkveehouder, agrarisch adviseur, docent en student. De opgenomen informatie is bruikbaar voor de ondersteuning van het dagelijks management én voor het management op de lange termijn.

Dit rapport betreft het laatste rapport van het project Animal Welfare Check Points (2012-2014) waarin vanuit de wetenschap en in de praktijk is gekeken naar het proces van laden, transporteren, lossen en verdoven van slachtdieren in Nederland.

In opdracht van het ministerie van Economische Zaken is onderzoek gedaan naar specifieke problemen bij het bepalen van de geschiktheid van dieren voor lange transporten. Ook is gekeken of er voor deze transporten hogere eisen gesteld moeten worden aan de fitheid van de dieren.

In opdracht van het ministerie van Economische Zaken is onderzoek gedaan naar specifieke problemen bij het bepalen van de geschiktheid van dieren voor lange transporten. Ook is gekeken of er voor deze transporten hogere eisen gesteld moeten worden aan de fitheid van de dieren.

This report describes investigations regarding animal health and welfare, emission of greenhouse gasses, labour and economy, human food safety and soil fertility on a commercial farm with an experimental bedded pack barn. The bedding consisted of a layer of composting wood chips and was aerated actively and cultivated daily., Dit rapport beschrijft onderzoek naar diergezondheid en welzijn, emissie van broeikasgassen, arbeid en economie, voedselveiligheid en bodemvruchtbaarheid op een praktijkbedrijf met een experimentele vrijloopstal. Het ligbed bestond uit een laag composterende houtsnippers die actief werden belucht en waarvan de toplaag dagelijks werd gefreesd.

Het digitale Handboek Melkveehouderij 2013 is geactualiseerd met de laatste ontwikkelingen in de melkveehouderij, zoals in de hoofdstukken: - Bemesting; - Grasland en voedergewassen; - Voederwinning; - Rundveeverbetering; - Gezondheid; - Melkwinning; - Bedrijfsgebouwen; - Mechanisatie.

Binnen Europa vindt er nogal wat diertransport plaats. Zo gaan er varkens van Frankrijk naar Duitsland, runderen van Litouwen naar Spanje en van Nederland naar Frankrijk, paarden van Polen naar Italië en schapen van Hongarije en Roemenië richting Italië. Wageningen UR werkt in het kader van een Europees project aan protocollen om het welzijn van de dieren tijdens lange transporten te kunnen beoordelen.

Het Handboek Melkveehouderij 2012 is geactualiseerd met nieuwe kennis, onder andere over graslandbemesting, onkruidbestrijding, rundveeverbetering en diergezondheid. Ook is informatie over schuimvorming op mest en groeien met rendement toegevoegd.

This study investigated whether extending the natural photoperiod with different colours of artificial light influences the biological clock and body functions of dairy cows. This study shows that the biological clock of dairy cows is relatively insensitive to red light. In comparison with red artificial light, photoperiod extensions with other light colours have differential effects on the dairy cow., In deze studie is onderzocht of het verlengen van de natuurlijke daglengte met verschillende kleuren kunstlicht van invloed is op de biologische klok en het functioneren van de melkkoe. Uit deze studie blijkt dat de biologische klok van de melkkoe relatief ongevoelig is voor rood licht. Ten opzichte van rood kunstlicht, hebben daglengte verlengingen met andere kleuren licht verschillende effecten op de koe.

Binnen Europa vindt er nogal wat diertransport plaats. Zo gaan er varkens van Frankrijk naar Duitsland, runderen van Litouwen naar Spanje en van Nederland naar Frankrijk, paarden van Polen naar Italië en schapen van Hongarije en Roemenië richting Italië. Wageningen UR werkt in het kader van een Europees project aan protocollen om het welzijn van de dieren tijdens lange transporten te kunnen beoordelen.

In this report the results are described of the experiment investigating the effect of physical activity during the dry period on health and welfare of dairy cattle., Dit rapport beschrijft de resultaten van het onderzoek naar het effect van beweging gedurende de droogstand op gezondheid en welzijn van melkkoeien.

Het digitale Handboek Melkveehouderij 2011 is geactualiseerd met de laatste ontwikkelingen in de melkveehouderij, zoals de benutting van meststoffen, verliezen tijdens het winnen, bewaren en voeren van graskuil, verlichting van melkveestallen, het onderhoud van melkmachines en het management van melkkoeien in de transitieperiode. Ook is de informatie over rundveeverbetering en diergezondheid herzien.

Claw health, locomotion, feed intake, milk yield, body weight, activity, and lying and standing behavior of dairy heifers were monitored in a single dairy herd during the first 3 mo after calving. During the first 8 wk after calving, 2 treatments were applied: restricted freestall access by closing the stalls between 2300h and 0500h (yes or no) and alley flooring (concrete or rubber topped slatted floors). Apart from treatments, housing was identical. The animals were kept in small groups (n=4 to 6) in adjacent barn pens. Thereafter, the animals were kept in 1 group in a freestall section with concrete slatted floor and unrestricted access to the stalls for 5 wk. All animals were fed the same partial mixed ration. We hypothesized that (1) hard flooring causes high mechanical load of the claws and (2) restricted freestall access causes prolonged standing bouts and reinforced effects of hard flooring on claws. The heifers had only minor claw lesions before first calving, and the prevalence and severity of sole hemorrhages increased during the first 3 mo after calving (from 0.24±0.08 to 1.18±0.14 and from 0.04±0.01 to 0.24±0.02, respectively), particularly in the outer hind claws. Animals kept on rubber alley flooring had lower average hemorrhage scores in wk 9 (0.13±0.03 vs. 0.21±0.03) and wk 14 (0.20±0.03 vs. 0.27±0.03) after calving, had a slower feed intake (3.05±0.14 vs. 3.46±0.14 g/s) and spent more time feeding (7.3±0.3 vs. 6.6±0.3 min/h) than animals kept on hard concrete alley floors. Restricted freestall access resulted in fewer standing bouts per day (14.4±1.0 vs. 17.9±1.0) and more strides per hour (99.8±5.4 vs. 87.2±5.4) without changing overall standing time (15.0±0.3 vs. 14.7±0.3 h/d) and did not affect the occurrence of sole hemorrhages. The animals with no overnight freestall access spent more time standing (55.9±0.9 vs. 35.8±0.9 min/h) and feeding (7.8±0.3 vs. 4.3±0.3 min/h) between 2300 and 0500h and less during the rest of the 24-h period (31.3±0.8

Het digitale Handboek Melkveehouderij geeft in 13 hoofdstukken informatie over de ontwikkelingen in de moderne melkveehouderij. Behandeld worden: 1. Bodem en water; 2. Bemesting; 3. Grasland en voedergewassen; 4. Agrarisch natuurbeheer; 5. Voederwinning; 6. Veevoeding; 7. Rundveeverbetering; 8. Gezondheid; 9. Melkwinning; 10. Bedrijfsgebouwen; 11. Mechanisatie; 12. Kwaliteitsborgingssystemen; 13. Bedrijfsontwikkeling. Het handboek melkveehouderij 2010 is geactualiseerd met de laatste ontwikkelingen in de moderne veehouderij.

Is zwangerschapsgym goed voor koeien? Wageningen UR Livestock Research liet droge koeien rondstappen in een tredmolen om die vraag te beantwoorden. Uit de eerste resultaten van het onderzoek blijkt dat extra beweging in de droogstand zorgt voor actievere en gezondere verse koeien.