Analysis of Feeding and Drinking Patterns of Dairy Cows in Two Cow Traffic Situations in Automatic Milking Systems

Abstract

With increasing possibilities for obtaining online information for individual cows, systems for individual management can be developed. Feeding and drinking patterns from automatically obtained records may be valuable input information in these systems. With the aim of evaluating appropriate mixed-distribution models for feeding and drinking events, records of 30 fresh cows from visits at feeding stations (n = 83,249) and water bowls (n = 67,525) were analyzed. Cows were either allowed a high-milking (HF) or a low-milking (LF) frequency by being subjected to controlled cow traffic with minimum milking intervals of 4 and 8 h, respectively. Milking frequency had significant effects on feeding patterns. The major part (84 to 98%) of the random variation in feeding patterns of the cows was due to individual differences between cows. It can be concluded that cows develop consistent feeding and drinking patterns over time that are characteristic for each individual cow. Based on this consistency, patterns of feeding and drinking activities have valuable potential for purposes of monitoring and decision making in individual control management systems. Use of a Weibull distribution to describe the population of intervals between meals increased the statistical fit, predicted biologically relevant starting probabilities, and estimated meal criteria that were closer to what has been published by others.

The temporal structure of feeding behavior

“…The same models could be applied to cows on mixed diets with high or low forage-to-concentrate ratios (70) and with high or low protein content (69). These models have led to novel methods to analyze diurnal pat-terns in cow feeding behavior (70) and have successfully been applied to analyze data sets obtained with cows elsewhere (1,19,43,50,55).…”

Maize silage particle length modulates feeding patterns and milk composition in loose-housed lactating Holstein cows

“…As a result, they tended to compensate the lower feed intake by visiting the feeders earlier the next morning. Other investigators indicated that initiation of a new meal correlates positively with the time since the last meal and negatively with the amount of feed consumed on that meal (Tolkamp et al, 2002;Melin et al, 2005).…”

“…Meal criteria (i.e., minimum time interval that a cow was away from the feeder to be considered a meal) were determined for each cow and treatment separately by fitting log-transformed individual intervals (i.e., an interval is the time between two adjacent visits) collected for 6 days to a mixture of Gaussian and Weibull (G-W) distribution using PROC IML (SAS, 2001), as outlined by Melin et al (2005). Individual meal criteria were used to calculate the daily number of meals per cow.…”

“…In dairy cows, feeding occurs in distinct meals, and changes in feed intake happen when size of meals, intervals between meals, or both are modified (Forbes, 1985). Analysis of feeding behaviour (i.e., occurrence distribution of visits and eating meals) has been found to be appropriate when studying the short-term regulation of feed intake, and it has given insight into how feed intake is affected by concentrate level (Tolkamp et al, 2002), forage source (van Dorland et al, 2008;Mazzenga et al, 2009), social environment (Nielsen, 1999) and management practices (DeVries et al, 2005;Melin et al, 2005). With computerized feeders, eating visits can be recorded easily, which allows for detailed studies on individual feeding patterns.…”

Competitive behaviour of dairy cows at a concentrate self-feeder

“…Lowering the dispensation rate might hinder the gaining of leftovers (Konggaard, 1980). A gate at the back of the feeder could also be used to restrain butting (Melin et al, 2005). More studies are needed to solve the problems of disturbing and stealing at the concentrate self-feeder.…”