Energy Monitoring of Fully Automated Dairy-Farm: A Case Study

Automation in livestock farm is developed for various monitoring and control services such as herd management, milk production, environmental control and behaviour monitoring. In such applications, automated systems are used in order to collect data on physiological and health conditions of the animals. Subsequently they are made available to the farmer, providing a general overview of the condition of the herd as well as detailed actions on herd management. However, a more advanced use of automation devices that take part in the production process without a direct human-control relies on the most advanced automation application in dairy production involves the use of robots or intelligent machines that are capable of interacting with their work environment. The present research was focused on the energy monitoring of a fully automated dairy farm, located in the Veneto region of Italy, including automatic: milking system (AMS), feeding system (AFS) and robotic scraper (ARS). The paper reports an analysis on performance indices to quantify improvements in the functionality of the automated systems, including energy consumption and man labour. Preliminary results have shown a reduction of energy consumption of at least 35% compared to conventional systems and, moreover, the energy consumption of the farm has become more regular, with the effect of a greater flexibility than conventional systems.