Project Cow : Cow is an essential requirement for Human Being.
Background
Cow is one of the most common animal that can be found on Malaysia as it supply us with dairy milk. For a child that still in a middle of growing, they need to be supply with milk. Unfortunately, not everybody can afford to buy milk because, let’s face it, milk is expensive!.
One of the reason is because the demand and supply is imbalance. the local dairy cow can only produce milk for 6 out of 10 Malaysian.
Last year, we are seeing a reverse trend where 6 out of 24 dairy farms in Sabah was closed down after continuous losses.
After a brief moment where we visit the local dairy farm and interview the farmer. It turns out that most of the local dairy farm is having problem on tracking their farm management cost, that also include the land costs, dairy cow costs, and calf rearing costs.
We research a little more and found out that the current calf management in dairy farm around Malaysia still rely on a software from a primal age, standard Microsoft Excel form. The farmer need to manually input the estimated calf weight and the formula that they have design will calculate the amount of food intake and cost of the food.
Unfortunately, the weight estimation is often incorrect, which results in Overfeeding or Underfeeding of the calves. Overfeeding will inflate the food costs and Underfeeding will lead the calf to malnutrition and illnesses. The prolonged malnutrition and illnesses can lead the calves to an unfortunate death.
Research question
- How to accurately determine the weight of the call ?
- How to determine that the vision system can effectively give the accurate result from the data ?
- How to determine the growth of calf ?
Objective of the study
- To measure the weight of calf autonomously when needed at certain time period.
- To apply artificial intelligence vision system to integrate with the weight data and determine the calf behavior.
- To investigate the growth of calf using the weight data recorded.
Methodology
In the research design above, the weight of calf was measured within the cage and then compiled to the database. All the data were extracted from the database were integrated with the vision system to determine the condition/behavior of the calf.
Solution
We proposed a solution to solve this problem by using a veterinary surveillance system to support the dairy calf rearing decision based on artificial intelligence and machine vision. The system will be having 3 main module:
- Precise calf weight estimation using machine vision and deep learning
- Optimized daily food or medicine intake calculation
- A stochastic bioeconomic model to estimate costs of rearing.
Method
Cow Cages
- This is the 3D design model of the cow cages that we propose to be used onto the cow project.
- This is the design of the cow cages in real size that we proposed to be used onto the cow project.
Portal
- This is the cow dashboard portal design that we will be using on the cow project.
Opportunity
The system will be able to provide us with a few opportunity to avoid the current problem from happening again in the near future while giving local dairy farmer an advantage in farming dairy :
- The system will be able to increase the farming efficiency.
- Dairy farm will be to grow their farm expansions.
Local dairy farmer will be able to avoid meeting with Overfeeding where the inflation of food costs would be increase. Local dairy farmer can also avoid meeting with Underfeeding where it can lead the calves to a prolonged illnesses or death.
Conclusion
To monitor a growing calves are not an easy task, countless of time were consumed to make sure the calves would be growing healthy. The Artificial Intelligence vision system that were going to used will be able to cut down any unnecessary time by autonomously monitor the growing calves. The profit and expense can also be optimized accordingly.
