Adoption, Use, and Management of Automated Milk Feeders for Group-housed Dairy Calves
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigated the adoption of automated milk feeders (AMF) and the prevalence and effects of management practices used to raise calves in groups with AMF on Canadian dairy farms. I used three study designs: a survey, a longitudinal observational study, and a controlled trial. The survey of 670 dairy farmers across Canada helped determined the prevalence of various calf management and feeding practices and compared these between farms using manual milk feeding (MMF) and AMF systems. The factors influencing producers to switch to AMF were also investigated. Sixteen-percent of respondents used an AMF. These farms were larger, used more automation, provided more milk to calves, and grouped calves at an earlier age compared with MMF farms. The key motivators for adoption of AMF were to raise better calves, provide higher milk allowances, reduce labour, and improve working conditions, while the key barriers were costs regarding investment in the equipment and group-housing facilities. In the observational study, 17 farms in southern Ontario feeding milk with AMF to group-housed calves were visited 4 times over one year, to identify management factors associated with the prevalence of calf diarrhea (CD) and bovine respiratory disease (BRD). Overall calf-prevalence of CD and BRD were 23% and 17%. The use of calving pens for additional purposes, calf pens located in barns where older cattle were present, and inadequate quality of bedding (adding fresh bedding every ≥ 7 days, and allowing manure-saturated bedding to accumulate) were associated with increased within-pen disease prevalence. The controlled trial investigated the effect of the age of introduction of calves to a group pen with an AMF (< 1 (early) vs. 5 days of age (conventional)) on learning to use the AMF, growth, and the requirements for labour. Early introduction resulted in decreased total labour for milk feeding, despite the fact that early-introduced calves took longer to learn to use the AMF than conventional introduction. Average daily gain was not affected by age of introduction, but the risk of having a severe case of diarrhea was higher for early-introduced calves.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".