Non-contact feed weight estimation by RFID technology in cow-feed alley

The cow’s individual feed intake and, consequently, feed efficiency are traits with a high economic value for the livestock farmer. Feeding behavior and feed intake have traditionally been determined by labour-intensive procedures such as human visual inspection and determination of feed refusals. However, the difficulty in manually collecting data at the time of feeding limits the extent of this type of monitoring. In order to overcome such limitations, optical techniques have been proposed in the last years as a fast-non-contact approach for feed weight/volume estimation. The present paper discusses the potential application of RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) technology for indirect estimation of the quantity of feed-ration present in the cow-feed alley. Experimental tests were carried out taking advantage of different amounts of feed ration for lactating cows (51.8% DM) composed by corn silage, alfalfa silage, hay, molasses, and concentrate. Preliminary results highlighted an interesting correlation (R2=0.90) between the minimum power demand for reading the RFID tags positioned on the feed-alley and the quantity of feed-ration to analyze. As the quantities of feed-ration increased, the power demand increased, providing an indirect indication of the variation in quantity. Moreover, the evaluation of the height of the distributed feed-ration showed a high positive correlation (R2 = 0.96) with the minimum power requirement for reading the RFID tags positioned on the feed-alley. The use of RFIDs on the feed-alley represents an interesting solution to define both the quantity of ration to distribute and the evaluation of the residual feed-ration in the feed-alley.