Mastitis is one of the most costly diseases to the dairy farming industry. Conventional antibiotic therapy is often unsatisfactory for successful treatment of mastitis and alternative treatments are continually under investigation. We have previously demonstrated, in two separate field trials, that a probiotic culture, Lactococcus lactis DPC 3147, was comparable to antibiotic therapy to treat b...

The paper presents the simulator SEPATOU that can reproduce the day-to-day dynamics of two interactive systems: the decision system representing the dairy farmer's management behavior and the biophysical system that encompasses the herbage production, consumption and transformation into milk. The activities to be managed concern the type and amount of conserved feed, where to fertilize and how ...

The focus of this paper is a social web site, Udderly Fantastic, that has been developed and implemented for the Australian dairy farming industry with the overarching goal of providing ‘a place for dairy-minded people to creatively celebrate the business.’ The aim of the study is to examine how an industry-wide social web site contributes to the creation of a sense of community amongst its mem...

Sustainability in livestock production system is largely affected by climate change. An imbalance between metabolic heat production inside the animal body and its dissipation to the surroundings results to heat stress (HS) under high air temperature and humid climates. The foremost reaction of animals under thermal weather is increases in respiration rate, rectal temperature and heart rate. It ...

Conventional livestock farming provides consumers with cheap and reliable sources of milk and meat. Yet the inevitable by-product, i.e. livestock faecal matter, represents a potential source of pathogenic microorganisms. This paper applies the Faecal Indicator Organisms Costing Assessment Tool (FIOCAT), which was designed as part of the RELU project ‘sustainable and holistic food chains for rec...

A survey carried out on 18 farms in Switzerland, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands indicates current trends in cattle feeding. An increasing number of farms are relying on automatic feeding to ease their workload, save time and achieve flexibility. The farms surveyed were practical users of automatic feeding systems. There are various systems which permit the automation of feeding systems. A...

Dairy farming has become one of the most important industries for China’s national economic development, but dairy process emits large amounts greenhouse gases, which accelerate effect. Improving green production efficiency is harmonious development between and environmental protection. This paper explores evolutionary characteristics GMLMI (Green total factor productivity farming) in terms sca...

BACKGROUND Fatty liver is a major metabolic disorder in dairy cows and is believed to result in major economic losses in dairy farming due to decreased health status, reproductive performance and fertility. Currently, the definitive means for diagnosing fatty liver is determining the fat content of hepatic tissue by liver biopsy, which is an invasive and costly procedure, making it poorly suite...