Dairy Farming

Estonian University of Life Sciences (EMU) is the only university in Estonia whose priorities in academic and research activities provide the sustainable development of natural resources necessary for the existence of Man as well as the preservation of heritage and habitat. The academic structure is composed of research and development institutes or institutions, centres and other structural units. Currently, teaching and research is carried out in five institutes.

The main objectives of ET4D is to improve animal welfare and production efficiency by creating the possibilities of data acquisition at the farms and making this information accessible to the farmers. The role of EMU in this project is about installing, maintaining PLF instruments on case farms and collecting relevant information from livestock with the application of different automatic systems and also assistance with data collection on farms inrelation to farmers attitude to ICT/PLF technologies.

The members of our team are very familiar with on-farm trials/experiments, so the skills we have developed during past projects will enable us to install the PLF instrumentation and collect relevant information. We also have the support of the Institute of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Sciences and Institute of Forestry and Engineering of our University for that. The principles and possibilities of automated monitoring of animals’ health and welfare in case of animal farms in Estonia are to be analyzed and suggested as the part ofPLF development and wider data and knowledge availability for farmers. To make the data acceptance more universal the data acquisition andcommunication solutions standardization possibilities are to be analyzed. The questionnaire data acquired during the project will be analyzed and madeavailable to the producers.