Access to an outdoor open pack promotes estrus activity in dairy cows
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dairy cows have a partial preference to access an outdoor deep-bedded pack, but the effects of continuous access to an outdoor area on estrous behaviors has not been studied. Our objective was to investigate if access to an outdoor open deep-bedded pack improves the expression of estrus behaviors. We enrolled 60 lactating Holstein cows directly after calving and followed them each for 12 weeks. Cows were housed in a single freestall pen holding 36 cows at a time, with a dynamic group composition. Half of the cows were randomly assigned to the OUTDOOR treatment; these cows had access to an outdoor open pack via an automated selection gate. INDOOR cows were housed together with OUTDOOR cows but were not allowed outdoor access. All cows were fitted with an automated activity monitor (AAM) 21 ± 3 d before expected calving date. Estrous behaviors (i.e., standing to be mounted and mounting behaviors) were continuously monitored using video, and the intensity of mounting (i.e., the number of standing to be mounted and other mounting behaviors per hour) was calculated per estrus event per cow. Temperature and humidity were monitored by data loggers indoors, and these data were used to calculate the Temperature Humidity Index (THI). Following an alert from the AAM, cows were checked to detect the presence of a dominant preovulatory follicle and an absence of a mature corpus luteum (CL) by rectal ultrasonography following milking, as well as 7 d thereafter to confirm ovulation by the presence of a new CL. A total of 94 estrus events were used in the final analysis. INDOOR cows tended to have a lower mounting intensity with increasing indoor THI, but no such effect was noted for OUTDOOR cows. The total number of cows in estrus positively influenced mounting intensity. OUTDOOR cows had a longer duration of estrus, as measured by the automated monitors, compared with INDOOR cows (12.4 ± 0.7 h versus 9.9 ± 0.8 h). Estrus event number and the total number of cows in estrus were both positively associated with estrus duration. These results indicate that access to an outdoor pack tended to increase mounting behavior for freestall housed dairy cows, especially during periods of elevated THI. We conclude that providing dairy cows access to an outdoor area can help with estrus detection and may thus help improve the reproductive programs on dairy farms.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| 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) | 0.001 | 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".