Practice Abstract - Research and innovation

Automatic Body Condition Scoring.

Hanno Jaakson and Priit Karis, Estonian University of Life Sciences

Understanding cows’ body condition score (BCS) is a valuable tool in the early identification of health and feeding problems and also extended periods and extent of negative energy balance (NEB) post partum. This is becoming more of a problem as cow milk yields increase and the ability to match intakes to requirements becomes more difficult to manage. Identifying NEB early in cows at risk is of great benefit to farmers. Manually assessing BCS is time consuming and to do so accurately takes skill and experience, while automatic devices can save time and labour and, if accurate, can give early warning of problems to farmers. A DeLaval automatic BCS device was tested on a 600-cow Holstein-Friesian dairy farm in Estonia. Sixty-six cows were compared using the automatic system and with trained assessors using visual assessment with a classic five-point BCS scale. The two methods gave very close scores, the manual assessment very slightly underscoring compared with the automatic system. This preliminary evaluation shows that the system works well and can be used by farmers to quickly and reliably identify those cows with too low BCS and allow the early management of that cow to prevent the problem from worsening.

Source Project
4D4F Data driven dairy decisions for farmers
Ongoing | 2016-2019
Main funding source
Horizon 2020 (EU Research and Innovation Programme)
Geographical location
United Kingdom
Project details

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