Animal Digital: Smart innovations for greater animal welfare

From smart sensors to automated processes: Helmut Bamler, deputy manager of the Bavarian State Farm Almesbach, offers an exclusive insight into the networked barn and shows how automation and health monitoring can achieve a new level of animal welfare and make farmers' work more efficient.

Augmented reality is finding its way into agriculture. At the Bavarian state farm Almesbach, AR glasses make it possible to link the digital and physical worlds. While the farmer is looking at the cow, all important data about the animal can be called up in real time and processed directly. This includes, for example, behavioral patterns when eating, walking and lying down, body temperature or rumination behavior.

More and more farms are turning to automated milking with milking robots. In Almesbach, too, automatic milking is already part of the daily routine, a big step towards efficiency and convenience. Hanna Market, specialist teacher at Staatsgut Almesbach, explains what data the milking robot documents, which in turn allows conclusions to be drawn about the animal's state of health and thus enables early action to be taken.

At the Almesbach state farm, the principle is "Today's healthy calves are tomorrow's healthy cows!" Various drinking techniques, such as the automatic calf feeder, are tested in practice. Jasmin Gietl, herd manager at Staatsgut Almesbach, will show how modern technology can be used to retrieve animal-related data, such as the amount of feed consumed, at any time. This enables problems to be identified as quickly as possible and immediate countermeasures to be taken.