Cattle Health App to Detect Lameness

Jan 17, 2024

By Zach Clemens

Lameness in dairy cattle is a major health and welfare concern, and perhaps one of the costliest clinical diseases for dairy operations. Timely identification of lameness is necessary to institute early treatment, reduce use of antibiotics, and improve treatment outcomes.

Associate Professor Santosh Pandey, along with veterinary medicine faculty, have been working together to develop an easy-to-use app to identify lameness in cattle at an early stage at the herd level.

“We came up with a prototype software system to automatically detect early signs of cattle lameness using live feeds from mobile smartphone cameras,” Pandey said. “When cattle pass through the camera’s field of view, we can track the different mobility parameters indicative of lameness and its severity. Thereafter, the farm operators are notified about the specific cows needing medical attention.”

Pandey said the whole idea is to make it as easy to use and accessible as possible, where cattle producers can take a video with any type of recording equipment and upload to a data analytics platform to be analyzed to catch lameness earlier, not only saving resources but also improving the cattle’s quality of life.

Source : iastate.edu

Video: Making budget friendly pig feed on a small livestock farm

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I am the 2nd generation to live on this property after my parents purchased it in 1978. As a child my father hobby farmed pigs for a couple years and ran a vegetable garden. But we were not a farm by any stretch of the imagination. There were however many family dairy farms surrounding us. So naturally I was hooked with farming since I saw my first tractor. As time went on, I worked for a couple of these farms and that only fueled my love of agriculture. In 2019 I was able to move back home as my parents were ready to downsize and I was ready to try my hand at farming. Stacy and logan share the same love of farming as I do. Stacy growing up on her family's dairy farm and logans exposure of farming/tractors at a very young age. We all share this same passion to grow a quality/healthy product to share with our community. Join us on this journey and see where the farm life takes us.