Need:

Collecting individual feed intake animal data

Aim:

Collecting individual feed intake animal data

Description:

Sheep are identified using their ear tags. If the animal is allowed access to a specific manger the gate goes down. When the allowed access time for that period is over, the access gate goes up, pushing the animal away from the manger so that another animal can get to the gate. The weight of the manger is measured before and after animal access and the weight difference is transferred to the central computer for analysis.

How to implement:

You need to have all your animals tagged. The manger is placed on a frame and rests on two electronic load cells. By turning the manger, it is easy to empty and clean it. BioControl’s PC Program extracts data of individual animal.

Expected benefits:

  • The system enables to feed animals according their individual requirements even if they share the same pen.
  • To feed different rations to different animals in the same group. The system will automatically close the gate when the animal has reached the expected intake of its ration.

Prerequisites and/or limits:

All animals need an EID tag and a PC management program is needed

Cost / Benefit Analysis

Social, environmental and welfare assessments

Country:

Italy

Production system (Dairy or/and meat sheep/goat):

Dairy sheep/goat

Category of Animal (ewe, goat, replacement, lamb, kid):

ewe/goat

Source of information:

 

Attachment/links:

ADOPTION PREDICTION:

What is the expected uptake of this technology and when might peak uptake happen?

PDF SUMMARY

Dairy Goats Dairy Sheep Meat Sheep
Tjotta_meat_sheep_Norwegian_digifarm
NIBIO Tjøtta – Digifarm Norway
UNISS, Universty of Sassari Department of Agriculture
Le CHIIRPO - Sm@RT Platform
CIIRPO Le Mourier – Digifarm France
Italian Innovative Farm: Dairy Sheep
Italian Innovative Farm: Dairy Goat 2
Italian Innovative Farm: Dairy Goat 1
Hungarian Innovative Farm: Nagy’s Farm