AI provides personalised cooling for dairy cows

This work was carried out with the support of UK Research and Innovation.

Cow’s milk is an integral part of most of the UK’s daily diet. But - much like other parts of the food sector - it is coming under increasing pressure from climate change, and these challenges mean we will need to inject a bit of cutting edge technology into the tried and tested traditions of farming. Will Tingle has been to southeast Wales to see this for himself…

Will - There are around about 1.9 million dairy cows in the UK right now. Given the cost, space requirement involved, and emissions produced by a cow, it does make sense to get the most milk you can from each individual, rather than increasing the size of the herd. Now much like us, a stress-free cow yields a better and more bountiful product. And one thing that cows really do not like is excess heat stress, and that is something I can entirely relate to. So how do we adapt to the behemoth of climate change whilst increasing food production for our growing population, and doing it in a sustainable and ethical way? That question has brought me here to Usk, a town in the east of Wales, to witness the exploits of agricultural ventilation experts, Galebreaker. My guides today are their animal welfare specialist Chloe Rodriguez, and kicking us off, Technical Director Andrew Gardner.

Andrew - So Galebreaker has always been about natural ventilation in farm buildings, so bringing fresh air and trying to create the optimum environment for the animal. One of those with the dairy cow is actually heat stress. So yeah, this project was all about how we can embrace artificial intelligence to help with that, solving that problem.

Will - Chloe, to bring you into this, heat waves and heat is becoming an increasing problem around the world. What does heat do to a cow that is a problem?

Chloe - When you're looking at dairy cows and heat stress, you're looking at a combination of the temperature and humidity, and it's actually because on a day that we might think, oh it's a lovely day, put our t-shirts on and it's nice and go outside about 18 degrees. Actually, if the humidity in the building is up at 70 or 80, cows could be getting quite heat stressed at that. That humidity, that lets cows be heat stressed at lower ambient temperatures. Cows cannot regulate their temperature like we can through sweating, so the only way that they can really regulate their temperature is through increased respiratory rate or panting. And again, when a cow lies down, she accumulates heat and when she stands up, she can get rid of her heat, so that's why on a hot day you'll see a lot of cows standing.

Will - If the heat increases by a considerable amount, you're expecting to see the cows suffer physiologically?

Chloe - Yes, so initially you'll see behavioural changes, the cows will have increased standing times, they'll be panting, and then in turn that will affect fertility, that will affect lameness rates, and then eventually that will also decrease milk production.

Will - Do we have any, and I hate to be so callous as to put a number on it, but do we have any idea just how much heat can affect the cow?

Andrew - During the first phase of this project, where we were actually monitoring animal behaviour during the summer of 2023, there was one significant heat stress event where not only is the cow dropping its milk yield during the heat, but because of the stress that they've incurred, we actually found that their milk yield dropped for the next 20 days following that heat stress event, and actually yeah, during that time, we saw on average those cows dropping 50 litres of milk, what they could have been producing if they hadn't seen that heat stress event, and the price of milk that they were getting for it, the losses on the farm was about £2,500.

Will - And with losses like that, it really is in everyone's interest to keep the cows cool, and this is where the forefront of AI is allowing us to consult perhaps the leading authority on how hot a cow is feeling, that is to say the cow itself. It's time for myself, Chloe and Andrew to take a trip down to the cow shed and see what the future of dairy farming could well look like.

Well we are now deep in the cow shed, this smell brings me back to my youth. What I'm looking at here is I'm looking at a couple of vent tubes with holes in the bottom aimed down towards some resting cows, and I'm looking at some very fetching translucent shades on the outer walls of the building as well. Talk me through what these are.

Andrew - Yeah, okay, so on the side of the building we've got the side curtains, and it does allow natural light through, but as it gets warm we want that curtain to open so it rolls up, allowing fresh air into the building. Above the cubicle itself though, where we want the cows to be lying down in those hot conditions, just like a human, what we like if we're in an office we want to have a desk fan or a stream of air coming across us to help us keep us cool. So what we've developed is a positive pressure tube, so that's that inflatable tube that goes directly along the length of the cubicles, and there's a jet of air that's spraying onto the back of the cow keeping it cool, and that's where their heat production is around their rumens. For positive pressure tubes in the past we were literally advising the farmer to switch them on when they think it gets hot and leave it running continuously. With regards to the curtain we were measuring the temperature inside the building and opening and closing it. We want to put the animal first in that control system and therefore if we can monitor the behaviour of the cow we can let the cow decide, or the cow's behaviour decide, what does the cow need and therefore which of our ventilation systems need to be activated.

Will - You're essentially saying then we're allowing the cows to maybe not choose but dictate how and in what way their building is ventilated to keep it cool. Why is this different or why is this better or more beneficial than the old way?

Andrew - Every cow is slightly different and the conditions they're experiencing are quite different. So in the old way of where we've just got a single temperature sensor we basically treat every cow the same, therefore some cows might have needed that ventilation or cooling earlier and the thought was that we would create a more optimum environment for each and every animal.

Will - This is far more customisable, is it also perhaps slightly more energy efficient because you don't have to have constant mechanical opening closing that sort of thing?

Andrew - No exactly, so the fact that when you're treating the herd as an average or on everything then actually it's probably more common that you would be running the controls or running the devices for longer and the cost of running a fan can be quite sizable certainly with the increase in electric costs.

Will - Big question then, how are you getting all of this individualised personalised cow data?

Andrew - SmartBell had an ear tag that goes onto the cow which has an inbuilt accelerometer and an ear temperature sensor. The tag is monitoring that ear movement and really subtly that ear movement can be different if they're eating, if they're lying, if they're ruminating, if they're drinking, walking and therefore it was through a machine learning approach where we could use that ear movement to tell us what each and every cow was doing. So we were effectively monitoring each cow to know how long they're lying down, how long they're eating, is that normal, is it dropping off and we saw how those behaviours correlated with heat stress events and therefore we can activate the control system earlier.

Will - So this gives you much more concurrent data as opposed to one single temperature reading in the centre of a barn?

Andrew - Yeah exactly.

Will - Can I have a look at one?

Oh here we go, this is tiny, there must be so much information being packed into this and yet we are looking at something smaller than a padlock on the cow's ear and presumably this has no real effect on the cow's day-to-day activities?

Chloe - No not at all, cows have to be tagged anyway so they wear two large earrings anyway so it's just another tag in the ear.

Will - Where does this information go?

Andrew - The tag is Bluetooth connected to a receiver which then sends up to the cloud so everything is up in the cloud, all that data is being collated remotely and we can access that data at any time as well to see exactly what cows are doing, individual cows are doing and their general behaviours. That's how SmartBell was obtaining all that data to then do the subsequent analysis.

Will - So this is all very impressive, where are we going forwards from here?

Andrew - We certainly wouldn't for the cows sake hope for a hot summer but our intention is for 2025 that we can actually really validate if this system works and then with our true validation really seeing the improvements in animal welfare, production and a happy animal and a happy farmer then we would really feel we've got a commercial proposition to take this wider.