Galebreaker and Smartbell: using AI monitoring to alleviate livestock stress

The partnership between Galebreaker’s and Smartbell harnessed the power of AI with the support of the Innovate UK BridgeAI Feasibility Studies competition; additionally receiving further project extension grants to build upon their initial work. This funding opportunity was designed to invest in high-impact projects aimed at developing innovative AI-driven solutions to address business challenges and opportunities, ultimately driving improvements in business productivity within the applicants’ industry.

The challenge

Heat stress in dairy cows can affect fertility, cause lameness, and impact on udder health and milk yields, as well as being a risk to life. This could cost a farmer with an average sized herd over £20,000 a year. Galebreaker currently monitors and controls ventilation devices using overall building conditions, based on theoretical thresholds. In reality, all cows have slightly different optimal conditions, so the impact of environmental conditions on productivity and health can vary between individuals.

The solution

Through securing grant funding through BridgeAI, this project explored the use of AI to monitor individual cow behaviours to ascertain if and how building ventilation could be optimised. This could improve individual cow welfare, while enabling more efficient and effective ventilation devices.

The funding enabled the project team to develop ML models to interpret data from cow ear-tags; translate it into time-stamped data that shows when each individual is active, lying down, ruminating and feeding; and then ascertain how these behaviours are affected by the temperature and humidity of the animal’s environment. Being able to analyse real-time behaviour in this way yielded two key findings.

Looking at individual cow behaviour, milk productivity, fertility and health has shown the impact of a heat stress event in detail, and how it directly affects an animal’s output. This shows the value of a new approach to cow-centred management practices, for example, moving vulnerable cows to different areas of a barn to reduce the impact of heat stress.

An index could be developed to control trigger activation or deactivation of ventilation devices, based on individual animal behaviour and environmental conditions. Such an environmental control index could potentially lead to more cost-effective management of the local conditions for each cow.

By applying our core cow behaviour models, we are identifying the markers of early, yet troubling, signs of heat stress. Making early warning of heat stress immediately actionable by changing the environment is revolutionary.

Veena Adityan, Co-founder of Smartbell

This addresses a global need to ensure food production is sustainable into the future, through the focus on animal welfare. It is great that two UK manufacturers can collaborate together through the support of BridgeAI to continue to drive innovation on global issues within the agriculture sector.

Jeremy Scudamore, Managing Director of Galebreaker

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