Animal management system

Abstract

A highly automated non-confining system to continuously, or at selected time intervals identify, measure, monitor and manage the consumption behavior, substance intake, body weight and growth of individual animals in their usual production environment including range, pasture, feedlot, dairy and farm without disruption to typical behaviors in order to determine, analyze, model and predict a variety of conditions relating to animal health, productivity, efficiency and quality. A transmitter generally attached to the animal identifies the individual animal by a unique individual code. A weighing device measures animal weight while an animal is consuming substances. An antenna receives the unique signal from the transmitter and a transmitting and receiving device sends acquired signals to a computer and receives instructions from a computer. A computer acquires signals and modification factors incorporated in the computer generate an event or interval measurement of an animal's weight and gain, growth rate and substance consumption, and the animal behavior affecting the measurement. A visual identification mechanism marks cattle that the computer system has determined require intervention. The system models and predicts animal health and growth, performance, carcass characteristics, feed utilization, manure and methane output.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION [0001] This invention relates to an animal identification, measurement, monitoring and management system and a method of using the same in an animal production environment, more specifically, a system, which is capable of being used with multiple transmitters to automatically and continuously monitor the consumption behavior of individual animals; determine substance intake, and measure body weight and growth in order to predict and determine a variety of conditions relating to health, performance, production efficiency, quality and safety and moreover to visually mark an animal enabling intervention. BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION [0002] Over the past forty years or so passive radio frequency identification has been used to automatically identify objects. One example of a practical application of this technology has resulted in electronic identification of individual animals. The basic elements of such systems include a reader / transmitter, an antenna and a trans...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0009] Wherefore, it is an object of the present invention to overcome the aforementioned problems and drawbacks associated with the prior art, it is further an objective to provide a highly automated, non-confined, management system and method to allow continuous or time selected measurement of consumption behaviors, substance intake, weight and growth and the determination and monitoring of healthy and sick animals and their performance without disruption of typical animal behaviors in their usual environments which includes on farm, in feedlot, in dairy and / or on pasture.

[0010] A further object of the invention is to provide a transmission / receiving mechanism to facilitate transmission and receiving of data from the panel by means of wireless RF technology. Such remote transmission minimizes the amount of wiring that is necessary for use in this system and avoids the need to have a plurality of wires running from the remote data collection locations to a central monitoring location. The running of such wires, especially in agricultural environments, is costly and such wires can also readily become damaged and / or disconnected.

[0012] A further objective of the invention is to assimilate data combining both data mining and data modeling techniques. Data mining will seek individual animal and group correlations between large behavior, health, consumption and intake data sets the system acquires. Data modeling tools will further analyze observational and measured data using probability and what if simulation models to provide an improved predictive system. The outcome of this analysis will be the determination of the best economic method or interval at which to manage, treat and market animals thus providing the maximum return on investment to the operator.

Problems solved by technology

With currently available technology it is extremely difficult to read multiple transponders using one reader / transmitter.

If each one of the multiple transponders uses the same frequency to transmit its unique identification code back to the reader / transmitter, a single reader / transmitter is unable to readily decipher each individual identification code.

In order to make systems with multiple transponders operational, multiple reader / transmitters are required which, in turn, render such systems costly, and will also reduce the area in which the transponders can be simultaneously read.

Such practice is generally far more expensive than the potential financial gain obtained by such measurement because the animals are often bruised and stressed by this procedure, which may impact the feeding behavior and weight of the animals.

Handling, sorting and crowding is a major stressor in cattle.

Excessive stress during handling lowers livestock productivity.

Research has shown that cattle that become agitated in the squeeze chute have significantly lower weight gain and may be more susceptible to disease.

Large animal weight platforms or scales are difficult to maintain due to excessive manure buildup.

These methods are typically rule of thumb and do not provide a level of commercially acceptable accuracy and / or practicality.

Often these predictive measurements suffer from inaccuracies due to subjective assessment on intake, actual performance in the feedyard differing from projected, and effect of sickness on weight gain and performance.

In the aforementioned patent, the inventor suggests that weights can be taken with greater frequency than on arrival, but this is accomplished through a series of complicated and expensive gates, photosensors and scale placements.

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