P6: Future Systems – Dairy Da.T.A

Dairy UP’s P6 project is exploring ways to use existing farm, climate and industry data to develop ways to monitor cows and systems to help farmers make better decisions, for example about heat management, health and feeding. One aim is to support animal and environmentally friendly intensification.

Dairy UP’s P6 project involves three areas of work:

P6 is a suite of three projects that combine animal science and data science. Each project is being undertaken by a PhD student.

  1. P6a: Resilient cattle (heat tolerance): optimising on-farm energy use and cooling systems.
  2. P6b: Resilient cattle (health): early intervention for improved animal health, enabled by advanced sensing.
  3. P6c: Digital feeding – data-driven feeding to optimise grain allocation in pasture-based herds.

Progress

Project Update P6a (December 2024)

Managing dairy cattle in hot, humid conditions is an increasing issue for the Australian dairy industry, with climate change and the trend towards intensification.

Project Update (October 2023)

This project aims to utilise data, advanced technologies and automation to integrate information from multiple sources to enable the creation of tools that support on-farm decisions.

Publication (July 2024)

Ruminant Heat-stress terminology

PhD Projects

P6 - Cow responses to climate extremes

P6 - Novel monitoring tools to optimise individual animal management

In conference

Four Dairy UP PhD students presented their work at the 20th Australasian Dairy Science Symposium in Christchurch in November, thanks to support from the University of Sydney Postgraduate Research scheme.

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Resilient cattle

Dairy UP’s P6a Project is exploring the diversity in dairy cattle responses to heat events with the view to providing data to refine the model used to calculate DataGene’s Heat Tolerance Australian Breeding Value (ABV).

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P6 Lead/co-ordinator:

Cameron Clark

Cameron Clark

Prof Farming Systems | Deputy Director - Gulbali Institute for Agriculture, Water and Environment |Charles Sturt University

Project Team:

  • Yani Garcia (Usyd)
  • Ian Lean (Scibus)
  • Jim Rothwell (NSW DPI)
  • Peter Thompson (Usyd)
  • Anna Chlingaryan (USyd)
  • Maddison Pearce (USyd)
  • Alice Shirley (USyd)