Feeding behaviour is an area of research which links the nutritional and behavioural sciences. More recently, electronic systems for monitoring feeding behavior have been developed and validated. The monitoring system is often equipped with infra-red sensors with a very short response time that recorded the presence of a cow in the feeder. However, the immediate response system always records many non-eating visits due to the accidental trigger of the cow. Increasing response time of trigger helps to decrease recording non-eating visits, but may miss some small periods of recording feed intake.

Researchers from the Institute of Subtropical Agriculture (ISA) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences investigated the hypothesis that unrecorded period of feed intake was not the major factor to influence accuracy of recording daily feed intake in monitoring system, when response time after trigger of cow was increased. To achieve this goal, we conducted three experiments, which included estimating distribution of feeding behavior after feeding, comparing feed intake recorded by an automatic monitoring system versus direct weighting, and evaluating the effect of excluding the data of time interval after response time on visiting behaviors and feed intake. Our study indicated that the most of eating and non-eating visits had duration larger than 24 s (99.0%) and less than 24 s (65.3%), respectively. Compared with actual feed intake obtained by direct weighting, increasing response time greatly increased the recorded feed intake, with the greatest difference occurring at 6 s of response time. Although increasing time interval after response time linearly increased mean, median feed intake per visit and 10-h feed intake, it had little influence on 10-h feed intake (< 0.1%) and eating visit (< 5%). The data from this study suggest that an immediate response (0.3 s of response time) after triggered by the cows have little influence on measuring feed intake for dairy cow, with difference less than 1.5%, but can also have a lot of non-eating visits. Increasing response time helps to decrease the recording of non-eating visits, but can overestimate feed intake.

The research was supported by the project of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31922080), and National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFD0501800 and 2016YFD0500504).

The study entitled "Evaluation of response time in monitoring system on the accuracy of recording individual feeding behavior and feed intake in dairy cows" has been published in Animal Feed Science and Technology, more details could be found at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anifeedsci.2021.115026.

Contact: Rong Wang

E-mail: rongwang@isa.ac.cn

Institute of Subtropical Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Sciences