Development of a novel stall design for dairy cattle: Part I. The effect of an increased slope on lying behavior, rumination, cleanliness, and preference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The longitudinal slope of a stall is important for positioning cows in the stall and maintaining cleanliness of the stall surface. The objectives of this study were to determine the short-term effect of increasing free-stall slope from 4.5% to 9.3% on dairy cow lying behavior, rumination, milk production, cleanliness, and preference. In experiment 1, 60 multiparous Holstein cows were divided randomly into two groups and exposed to a 4.5% stall slope (standard in the research facility) and a 9.3% stall slope in a replicated crossover design with four 7-day periods. Each group of cows were housed in a pen with 30 free-stalls and switched between treatments weekly. Lying behavior and rumination were recorded continuously, milk yields were recorded twice per day, and cleanliness scores were collected on the last day of each week. Experiment 2 consisted of an 8-day preference test conducted with 14 cows from experiment 1 in an experimental pen with 32 stalls (16 stalls with a 4.5% slope and 16 stalls with a 9.3% slope). Continuous video monitoring was used to record time spent lying, standing, and perching in each treatment during the last 5 days, and lying time was used to assess preference. In experiment 1, cows spent 12 min/day less time lying down (12.8 vs 12.6 ± 0.28 h/d) and had 0.6 more bouts/day (9.5 vs 10.1 ± 0.38 no./d) with a shorter duration by 6 min/day (1.4 vs 1.3 ± 0.03 h/bout) in stalls with a 9.3% slope. Rumination was 5.5 min less per day in stalls with a 9.3% slope (578.4 vs 572.9 ± 16.56 min/d) and milk yield did not differ between treatments (33.6 vs 33.4 ± 0.78 kg/d). Stall slope did not affect cow cleanliness (1.6 vs 1.6 ± 0.05 points on a 1-5 scale). In experiment 2, cows showed no clear preference for lying, standing, or perching in either stall slope (4.5% and 9.3%) when given a choice. These results indicate that increasing stall slope from 4.5% to 9.3% marginally altered lying behavior, but did not interfere with stall use or influence cow preferences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".