Facilitating grazing for organic dairy farms with expanding herd size

Summary

Danish researchers have investigated the possibilities to facilitate organic dairy farms with innovative technology and design, with the aim of improving grazing and grazing management (technology for grazing).
Logistics, walking tracks, intelligent gates and individual behaviour sensors were investigated.
Best practice examples with track coverage and practical experiments with new gates and accelerometers were implemented together with monitor farms and results described.
Especially when using automatic milking systems, gates can be of help when distributing the animals among paddocks. Registration of grazing time by accelerometers can be used as decision support for dosage of supplementary feeding.
Wireless contact and automatic logging of contact data from RFID ear-tags gave information on outside time, which can be used in herd management.