Development of a Stockbreeding Management System for Dairy Cattle

젖소의 사양관리 시스템 개발

The agriculture and fishery share in the Korean GDP is continuously decreasing after 1960s. Furthermore the proportion of these industries in the GDP has diminished as low as 10 percent in recent years. However, the stockbreeding sector in these industries are considerably expanded. More than 50 percent of the whole farmhouses are involved in the livestock farming, and the stock farming portion is steadily increased in its size and scope. Thus, the mechanization and the automization of stockbreeding equipments are greatly required to reduce down production cost, as well as to win the competitiveness in the global market. From this aspect, developed in this paper is a stockbreeding management system (SMS) for dairy cattle, which can be used in small and medium sized dairy farms. First, the basic schema of the stockbreeding management system are addressed in view of stockbreeding management for individual dairy cattle. Electronic identification (EI) systems and sensory devices have changed stockbreeding management strategy from group stock control into individual stock control manner. The SMS receives stock body measurement data through the sensory devices such as weight, temperature, and milk conductivity meters. A common database then integrates those measuring data together so that the SMS can determine the appropriate solution on each stock's breeding such as feeding and milking. Thus, each stock can be supervised by a sophisticated SMS that provides the best solution to the stockbreeding throughout the stock's whole life-cycle. Secondly. six major submodules of the SMS, based on the EI and sensory devices, are proposed. They are individual stock management, disease management, health management, feeding management, milking management, and a propagation management submodule. Finally, a prototype system for the SMS is demonstrated. The system is developed using Delphi 2 client-server system run under the Windows 95 environment.