Young stock rearing using automatically recorded data

The subject ‘young stock rearing’ is important for future dairy farming. So far there has been too little attention for young stock rearing. Proper care by monitoring health and growth of the young animals will lengthen life expectancy and increase milk production of the adult dairy cow. Due to the increasing farm sizes it becomes harder for the farmer to pay sufficient attention to all individual animals. Facilities like automatic milk feeders and water drinkers combined with weighing systems are used to gather information about the status of all individuals. The information consists of daily milk and water intake, body weight and other behavioural data. Models are developed to detect deviations in the normal pattern of this information. Only these anomalies are reported with instructions for standardized actions to be undertaken, the standard operating procedures. This paper provides the background for the alerts for health problems and for lagging growth in young stock till the age of 4 months