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UK Beef Research Goes High Tech with Real-Time Health Monitoring

UK Beef Research Goes High Tech with Real-Time Health Monitoring

UK Beef Research Goes High Tech with Real-Time Health Monitoring

LEXINGTON, Ky.—

Cattle producers try their best to monitor the health of their herds for any sign of sickness and disease. For large producers, that can be a very time-consuming task. But new research at the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture could give farmers a real-time, inexpensive way of spotting signs of illness earlier, thus making treatment quicker and more effective. With a hefty grant of nearly $900,000 from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, UK Beef Cattle Nutritionist Eric Vanzant and Craig Carter, epidemiologist for the UK College of Agriculture’s Livestock Disease Diagnostic Center are collaborating on a project that also includes specialists in UK’s biosystems and agricultural engineering department, Eastern Kentucky University and NetQuest, a corporate partner based in Louisville.Vanzant is placing a monitoring device, designed as part of an ear tag by NetQuest, in the ears of some cattle at the UK Animal Research Center in Woodford County. The device will transmit real-time, ear-surface temperature data, as well as head position of cattle, via antennae to a receiving station. Vanzant and other researchers will then be able to immediately analyze the data and respond to early signs of sickness within the herd. “Our real motivation behind this was to come up with devices, not necessarily from a national biosecurity standpoint but from a standpoint of individual producers, and give them a tool that they can use to detect sick animals in the herd,” Vanzant said. “So we’ve been working on an ear tag that contains sensors that will give us information about the animal. Right now, we’re focusing on some very noninvasive types of sensing. We’re measuring the temperature of the ear, where the ear tag is located. We’re measuring activity of the animal. The main activity we’re able to pick up is eating and drinking behavior. This will allow us to detect when animals are off feed, which is the first sign of illness.”From the biosecurity standpoint, Vanzant said the research could play an important role in identifying possible disease outbreaks early on, so folks like Craig Carter can issue alerts to producers about what may be coming down the pike, ultimately based on data gathered from herds around the state. “The information we look at is mostly from cases that have been given to us by practicing veterinarians around the state, and so currently, the disease monitoring that we can do is pretty limited to findings that we make in laboratory testing,” Carter said. “That’s everything from a whole animal necropsy all the way down to one blood test that might be an indicator of a disease process that’s going on in the state. So this project has enabled us to build some computer systems that are going to help us better gather some of that information and then help us to better analyze it and generate alerts in case of a disease outbreak. At the laboratory we’d be more apt to generate that on a regional or county level when we see an increased incidence of something that’s going on, and then mount a response.”Vanzant said the work done up to this point has been done inside in a very controlled situation - with “pretty pampered animals.”“We’re just at the point right now to be getting sufficient numbers of tags to start doing some of the field work that really has to be done to adequately test feasibility and implementation of this,” he said. “Our intent is to do some of the work here at the UK beef research unit, looking at animals on feed. We’ll probably start with about 100 animals here, and then we’ve got plans in place to test it on farms in Kentucky - to track animals in transit from Kentucky to feedlots in the high plains, and then to continue tracking them through that process.”Carter said that Vanzant is one of very few animal scientists in the country on the leading edge of this type of technology.“It’s really going to change the way farms look at animal health,” he said. “You can see we are on the cusp of this wireless society and a whole brave new world is going to open up so many new applications and increase the capacity of our ability to monitor animal health in a near real-time, or even in a real-time fashion. The neat thing is this project is helping us to develop engines that will analyze this data and, it doesn’t really matter if it’s regional or statewide data or herd–based, the analysis will be just about the same.”Vanzant said additional research could be explored in the future, including measuring pulse rate, blood oxygen level and even the cow’s location on the farm – all via a similar, noninvasive monitoring device. “Ultimately having a device that’s inexpensive enough that producers will be able to buy it and put it on their animals – that’s the goal,” he said. The device could be as inexpensive as $5 per ear tag. Vanzant said there are other one-time costs associated with the monitoring system, such as hardware, software and receivers. “It’s amazing to me how inexpensive some of this technology is, and to a large extent the ultimate price is dictated by the quantities we purchase,” Vanzant added. “But it’s certainly not unreasonable to expect that we can have tags that would pick up temperature, activity and some of the other things we’ve talked about, with the radio transmitter that sends back to a base station for that price per tag.”

Contact Information

Scovell Hall Lexington, KY 40546-0064

cafenews@uky.edu