Advanced cattle feeding on pasture through innovative pasture management
Project information
Advanced cattle feeding on pasture through innovative pasture managementCall: ICT and Automation for a Greener Agriculture
Id: 14305
Acronym: i-LEED
Duration:
Consortium:
| No | Partner | Contact | Country | Total 1000€ | Funded 1000€ | Funder |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Coord. | Bayerische Landesanstalt für Landwirtschaft - Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Animal Husbandry | Zoltan Gobor | Germany | 379.4 | 232.8 | Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture |
| 2 | TSCF Research Unit IRSTEA | Christophe Cariou | France | 411.9 | 100.9 | French National Research Agency |
| 3 | dsp-Agrosoft GmbH | Werner Feucker | Germany | 176.4 | 123.4 | Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture |
| 4 | CEO and CTO Effidence | Cedric TESSIER | France | 330.7 | 148.8 | French National Research Agency |
| 5 | Dept. of Agricultural Machinery Dept. of Soil Sci. & Plant Nutrition Faculty of Agriculture Ege University | Arif Behiç Tekin | Turkey | 143.1 | 143.1 | Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey |
Links:
Summary:
The main goal is to optimise the feeding strategy for grazing cattle and to improve the methods of pasture management. An in the frame of the project developed pasture robot and a modified automatic grazing system (AGS) will be integrated into existing herd management software (HMS), providing an optimal feeding strategy for cattle and pasture maintenance. A robot will be redesigned and sensors for detection of biomass, cowpats etc. and actuators, a mulcher and a seeder, will be implemented. The robot will collect data about the fresh biomass and carry out selective pasture care and improvement after grazing, autonomously. The collected data from all relevant sources in the barn and the robot will be combined within the HMS to generate an optimal feeding strategy through allocation of an adequate grazing area size by controlling the AGS. Thus, high herd performance and high welfare status of each animal will be assured. The system will also help to minimize the environmental impacts.
Project progress and results:
The aim of the project is to optimise the feeding of cattle on pasture and the management of the pasture through introduction and fusion of innovative tools like the pasture robot and the i-LEED software. Finally, a fully functional pasture robot will be demonstrated. The pasture robot will be developed based on a redesigned existing robotic platform in order to allow stable movement under difficult terrain conditions. During the optimisation phase aspects of energy consumption, energy availability and mobility management will be particularly considered. The stability problem will be approached based on adaptive and predictive control techniques, designed to compensate for the perturbations encountered in a natural environment and perform accurate path following.
Furthermore, different actuators (mulcher, seeder) and adequate sensors for pasture care will be designed, build and implemented on the robot platform. In order to provide the necessary data for the actions of actuators and for the feeding strategy within the i-LEED software, suitable sensors have to be found for data collection. The sensors should provide information about the biomass (prior and past grazing) and allow detection of cowpats, heading gramineous plants, undesired plants or areas without vegetation in order to carry out selective improvement of pasture conditions after grazing and based on this to ensure optimised feeding of cattle.
The i-LEED software will interact with a global Herd Management Software (HMS) providing control of the pasture robot as well as providing calculations of the optimal feeding strategy for cattle and maintenance of the pasture.