On-Going
The project started in March 2023 and is running until June 2026. The total budget is 4,758,339.06€, of which 2,855,003.42€ are funded by Interreg North-West-Europe Programme. The partnership is composed of 12 partners from 7 countries.
HoliCow was born from the observation of a dramatical decrease in the number of small and medium-sized dairy farms in our territories. This decrease is multifactorial. First, access to technologies is complicated for these farms because of the investment and time needed to understand them. This leads to economic losses and lower resilience of the animals and farms. A second reason for the decrease of farm number is the detrimental opinion of the general public. Indeed, agri-bashing is very common nowadays, discouraging farmers to continue their activities.
Given the importance of these farms to maintain our landscapes, biodiversity and resilience, HoliCow partners decided to join forces to allow these farms to use affordable tools to improve their resilience and stay in business. In addition, a promotional campaign is planned to strengthen the relationship of the farmers and their local community.
Concretely, the partners previously achieved to predict biomarkers related to health, welfare, heat stress, methane emissions and other traits using the milk composition, and in particular the mid-infrared spectroscopic analysis. Now all these predictions will be gathered to create an easy-to-understand indicator to assess farm resilience. A community database will be created for farmers to help them answer the problems highlighted, with continuous improvement of the platform using feedback from users.
On-Going
ExtraMIR is an IDF (International Dairy Federation) /ICAR joint project with the overall goal of offering a more complete and deeper understanding of the activities related to the use of Mid Infrared (MIR) spectra in the dairy sector. Indeed, a lot of milk recording organizations are currently using FT-MIR derived indicators to provide reliable advice to their customers. However, there is quite a lot of variations in several aspects: analysis of the reference to build an equation, algorithms used, accuracies, standardisation methods of the analysers. Thus, the ExtraMIR initiative aims at making a clear overview of these aspects (the project is divided in 4 work packages).
Here are the objectives of ExtraMIR :
EMR is deeply involved in ExtraMIR by taking part in the different meetings, by providing spectral data to supply the world representative spectral database, providing reference fatty acids values and participating in a standardisation test.
link to the ExtraMIR page of IDF website: https://fil-idf.org/our-work/methods-of-analysis-and-sampling/extramir/
link to the ExtraMIR page of ICAR website : https://www.icar.org/index.php/technical-bodies/sub-committees/milk-analysis-sub-committee-landing-page/extramir-extra-value-from-smart-use-of-mir-spectra-2/
HappyMoo aimed at enabling farmers, veterinarians and extended workers to evaluate the welfare of dairy cows. This project was funded by Interreg North-West-Europe Program
In the highly competitive NWE dairy sector (60% of EU milk), animal welfare is an increasing concern for both consumers and authorities and is a cause of economic losses. In this framework, HappyMoo aims at providing dairy farmers, vets and extension workers a tool to monitor cows’ welfare and in particular the freedom from disease, hunger and stress. To achieve this, milk recording organizations (8), one IT-company, one pilot lab and research centres (3) are partners to build and design this tool, providing amounts of data and processing them via different statistical approaches. In particular, the possibility to use the mid-infrared spectrum of the milk to predict an impairment in those 3 freedoms will be investigated.
D4Dairy, an Austrian project coordinated by Zuchtdata aims to provide digital support to dairy management via a data-driven, networked information system, exploiting the potential of advanced technologies (mid-infra-red spectra, genome information, …) and advanced data analysis to further improve animal health, nutrition, animal welfare and product quality.
EMR EEIG is a company partner involved in data provision within the P2.2.: Disease Detection With Milk Spectral Data – Use of milk midinfrared spectroscopy to predict the health status of dairy cows.
This project began in October 2018 and ended in September 2022.
The purpose of the project is to be able to predict milk flavour alterations via the MIR analysis of milk. To achieve this, samples will be collected in several European countries and will be analysed by gas chromatography for free fatty acids. These results will be compared to the MIR spectrum in order to find predictive equations.
EMR is a company partner, providing samples.
The project began in December 2019 and is running until end of 2023.
The triple objective is to obtain similar spectra over time, across models of machine and across brands of machine. The network is comprised of approximately 65 MIR spectrometers in 25 milk laboratories.
The OPTIMIR project has resulted in the development of key models and equations ranging from the prediction of milk contstituents to indicators of cow health and efficiency.
A detailed survey of members was carried out on the theme of “The Perception and Opinion of the Farmers and their Consultants about the Sustainability of Milk Production and the Use of Farm Management Computerized Tools.”
