Measuring liveweight changes in lactating dairy ewes with an automated walk-over-weighing system

Abstract

Monitoring liveweight (LW) is an important part of sound management practices at the individual and flock level (e.g., controlling for nutritional status based on body condition, reproduction, and health-related issues), but it is time consuming and stressful. To our knowledge, no literature has reported on the evaluation of automated weighing systems in dairy sheep as an alternative to conventional static scales. The objective of this research was to evaluate the practical feasibility of using an automated walk-over-weighing (WoW) prototype to measure daily LW changes in dairy ewes without human intervention. We used adult Lacaune dairy ewes in 2 complementary trials conducted indoors. Trial 1 aimed at evaluating the repeatability, precision, and accuracy of LW measures recorded using WoW scales compared with a static scale (the gold standard). Forty-two adult ewes (LW ± standard deviation = 71.3 ± 10.4 kg) were randomly drafted from the main flock and used in a 1-day session. The trial included 3 passages. In each passage, ewes were weighed first on a static scale; once a static position was achieved and LW recorded, they continued the circuit and immediately traversed the WoW scale for an automated LW record. Trial 2 aimed to demonstrate the feasibility of using the WoW device under real-world conditions in a dairy sheep-farming system. The WoW scale was installed in the exit race of the milking parlor and evaluated over 7 wk with adult ewes in mid lactation (n = 93; LW 78.5 ± 8.1 kg). Once the ewes were acclimated to the WoW system, 1 group of ewes (n = 48) continued to receive the same feeding regimen (controls), and the other group (n = 45) underwent a nutritional challenge [challenged; 2 wk of undernutrition and then back to control regimen (refeeding) for 1 wk]. We evaluated the ability of the WoW to detect small changes in LW. We collected LW data (2 weighings per ewe per day) from the WoW after each of the 2 milking sessions (morning and evening). We also obtained LW values by weighing the ewes using a static scale once a week. The automated WoW system showed substantial agreement with the gold standard when assessed using Lin's concordance correlation coefficient and Bland and Altman's method, largely due to high repeatability. The WoW system was adequate for detecting small daily variations in LW during undernutrition and refeeding periods. Misbehaviors resulted in spurious WoW values in trial 2, requiring us to use filtration methods to exclude outlier weights and allow meaningful assessment of small LW changes. The WoW system evaluated here is an alternative to the static scales conventionally used on dairy sheep farms. If sound filtration of raw data is applied, WoW could contribute to the close (daily) monitoring of individual LW without operator intervention (i.e., voluntary weighing) and taking animal welfare into account (i.e., no stress related to the weighing session on static scales).

Kalman Filter With Impulse Noised Outliers : a Robustsequential Algorithm to Filter Data With a Large Number Of outliers

“…This Gold Standard (GS) measurement can be considered as the weight of the individual. In contrast with others experiments [22,14,16,15], this lead us to easily compare locfit and Kfino methods. For each animal, we calculate the obtained mean square error (9) by summing over all GS measurement days and using as X i this GS measurement.…”

“…Context. The motivation of the simple new algorithm we present comes from [22,14,16,15]. In these works, a new bodyweight / liveweight (BW) monitoring system for small ruminant is introduced.…”

“…We apply this method to a practical case study. The latter is based on the WoW weighing system detailed in the articles [22,14,16,15]. This corresponds to a weighing system for small ruminants for which a large number of impulse outliers arise naturally.…”

Growth and behaviour of post-weaned Mérinos d'Arles ewe lambs, as measured by a Walk-over-Weighing system under Mediterranean grazing conditions.

“…This coefficient shows however only a moderate agreement between the two weighing systems. This could be explained by the lack of controlled flow of animals crossing the platform (Alawneh et al, 2011;González-García et al, 2021). Even with an individual level of data cleaning, some misbehaviour data are still present and seem undetectable.…”

“…The WoW has been demonstrated to be less stressful compared with human handling and capable of collecting a much higher volume, and with a higher frequency, of LW records per unit of time compared to the standard static weighing system (Brown et al, 2014a;González-García et al , 2018a, 2018b, 2021. Even if this system seems highly promising, there are still only few reports on the use of this technology in small ruminants (and here only for sheep) and most of them have tested the WoW only with adult females, sometimes with their lambs (Brown et al, 2012;González-García et al, 2021, 2018bMorris et al, 2012;Polat et al, 2013). The objective of the current work is to push forward the state of the art on this matter, by testing the use of the WoW for monitoring the progression of individual LW (growth rate) in recently weaned ewe lambs under grazing conditions.…”