Technical note: Validation of a system for monitoring feeding behavior of dairy cows

An electronic system has been designed that allows for passive monitoring of feeding behavior of individual cows housed in a free-stall barn. The objective of this study was to validate the data generated by this GrowSafe feed alley monitoring system. Twelve lactating cows were each monitored for 24 h using both the GrowSafe system and time-lapse video. The GrowSafe estimation of number of meals consumed by each cow showed perfect agreement with meal frequency identified using the video recordings. The duration of these meals, as estimated by GrowSafe, was highly correlated with the meal duration derived from the video (R2 = 0.98). Despite the excellent agreement for these meal-based measures, for each cow we found some instances in which the video showed that a cow was present at the feed alley but GrowSafe failed to detect cow presence (12.6% of observations) and a few instances in which the reverse was true (3.5% of observations). However, all the missed or extraneous data from the GrowSafe system were closely associated in time with known periods of feeding. These results indicate that this feed alley monitoring system can provide very good measures of meal frequency and meal duration and reasonable estimates of instantaneous feed alley attendance for loose-housed dairy cattle.