Future of dairy farming from the Dairy Brain perspective: Data integration, analytics, and applications

Data integration is one of the biggest challenges the dairy industry faces nowadays due to increased number of technologies and data overflow at the farm. Here we review the current situation of precision dairy farming technologies that use integrated data and its application on the management decision process at the dairy farm. The most common data connections were those from activity monitors, dairy herd improvement records, herd management, and milking recordings. Algorithms used can be defined in general as artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches. Most of the 22 revised papers, research or review, demonstrated that applying different algorithms to integrated data provides additional and complementary insights to improve decision-making tools and therefore enhance economic, management and animal welfare, and hence the sustainability of dairy farms. All revised studies acknowledge the importance of live data integration to develop relevant decision support tools to improve decision making. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.