Application of lactation models on dairy cow farms

Abstract

An important branch of the modern global economy is food production. Our focus is milk production on dairy farms, the period in which cows produce milk (lactation) and the quantity of milk produced. Special attention will be given to the time-dependent function that describes the quantity of the milk produced over a lactation period. The respective graph is known as the lactation curve and is one of the most important indicators in dairy farm management. This paper will present time-dependent parametric models for daily average milk production on a particular dairy farm. Besides the well-known Wood's model, the data will also be fitted to some less known models such as the MilkBot model and also to a combination of these two models. Model parameters will be interpreted relative to milk production. Finally, we will compare all of the observed models.

Keywords

• lactation
• milk yield
• Wood’s model
• MilkBot model
• Levenberg-Marquart algorithm