Smart Dairy Farming: Innovative Solutions to Improve Herd Productivity

Among the most straining trends that farmers have to face there are: on one side, to guarantee welfare and adequate life conditions for animals and to reduce the environmental footprint, on the other side, to develop new strategies to improve farm management reducing costs. The current conditions and the expected developments of the dairy sector highlight a strong need for more efficient and sustainable farming systems. Studying heat stress, herd management and housing and animals’ productive and reproductive performances is fundamental for the economic and environmental sustainability of the dairy chain. New and effective tools to cope with these challenges have been provided by Precision Livestock Farming (PLF), which is nowadays increasingly applied and makes possible to control quali-quantitative parameters related to production, health, behaviour, and real-time locomotion per animal. The research key challenge is to turn these data into knowledge to provide real-time support in farming optimisation. This research focuses specifically on different systems to collect, process and derive useful information from data on animal welfare and productivity. A multi-disciplinary approach has been adopted to generate a decision support system for farmers.