Dairy cow preference and usage of an alternative freestall design
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Freestall housing for dairy cows was created to reduce the amount of bedding and labor needed to keep stalls clean. However, some aspects of stall design may restrict stall usage by cows. The aim of this study was to assess dairy cow preference and usage of a conventional stall (with a neck rail and metal stall dividers) and an alternative stall design with no neck rail or stall dividers other than a wooden board protruding slightly (8cm) above the lying surface. In the no-choice phase of the study, 48 cows were randomly assigned to 8 groups (of 6 cows each); groups were alternately allocated to the 2 treatments. Each group was observed for 7 d on one treatment and then switched to the alternate treatment for 7 d. For the choice phase (also 7 d), groups in adjacent pens were merged (to form 4 groups, each with 12 cows) and cows had free access to both treatments within the merged pen. In the no-choice phase, cows spent more time standing with 4 hooves in the alternative versus conventional freestall (0.60±0.06 vs. 0.05±0.06h/d), but stall designs had no effect on time spent lying down (13.2±0.4 vs. 12.9±0.4h/d). In the choice phase, cows spent more time lying down in the conventional freestall (9.4±0.8 vs. 4.1±0.8h/d) and more time standing with all 4 hooves in the alternative stall (0.24±0.03 vs. 0.02±0.03h/d). These results illustrate how different stall design features can affect different types of stall use; the more open design facilitated standing fully in the stall, but the protruding partitions likely made the stall less suitable for lying.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".