UNPARALLELED AMOUNTS of data about cow behaviour are now available to agri-researchers via an application that accumulates readings from multiple 'CowAlert' devices fitted to dairy herds.

IceRobotics, the Edinburgh-based cow behaviour specialist, has already started trialling ‘CowAlert for Researchers’ in Europe, the USA and New Zealand, offering a real-time data gathering and analysis experience, which scales up CowAlert’s established monitoring and alerting modules, enabling researchers to control and analyse their own data or combine it with data from a large number of commercial farms.

IR describes the product as the’ single solution for dairy cow monitoring and research’, offering researchers a less labour-intensive monitoring system which can be tailored to their own specific requirements – and giving them the ability to export data out of their own system, allowing for data merging and larger scale statistical analysis.

CowAlert’s technology has been available commercially to farmers for seven years, using a rear leg-based sensor to continually monitor the health, lameness and fertility of each animal, alerting the farmer to any potential issues, enhancing health and productivity through improved decision making.

The launch of CowAlert for Researchers will take the product to a new level, said IR, by giving the research community access to the hours of data already gathered, which they can analyse in their own way. The company's Catherine Malcolm said: “This system is effectively transforming the way dairy research is done. With the ability to export and analyse large volumes of data, it makes the job of large-scale dairy research much easier and more efficient, in essence it offers vast amounts of useful data at the press of a button – at any time and in any place.

“Having worked at the forefront of dairy research for over 15 years, we are very excited about this new product and we are in discussions with many of the world’s leading research institutions who are keen to explore how CowAlert for Researchers can help them achieve their goals.

“We are committed to providing monitoring solutions which improve livestock wellbeing, whilst helping farmers and researchers to make better decisions with useful, timely data. We look forward to working with researchers across the globe as we continue to better understand livestock behaviour and create a more sustainable dairy industry."