Evaluation of response time in monitoring system on the accuracy of recording individual feeding behavior and feed intake in dairy cows

The monitoring system can automatically collect the quantitative data of the feeding behavior and feed intake of individual cattle, and the immediate response system always records many non-eating visits. Increasing response time of trigger helps to decrease recording non-eating visits, but may also miss some small periods of recording feed intake. This study was to evaluate the effect of response time in monitoring system on the accuracy of recording individual feeding behavior and feed intake in dairy cows. The first experiment was to investigate the distribution of 10-h feeding behaviors of 8 Holstein dairy cows after morning feeding by using infra-red camera. The second experiment was to investigate accuracy of feed intake recorded by the monitoring system with different response times (0.3, 3, 6, 12 and 24 s) in comparison with direct weighting. The third experiment was to investigate effect of excluding the data of time interval after response time on feed intake and visiting behaviors recorded by the monitoring system, when response time was set as 0.3 s. The results showed that the most of eating and non-eating visits had duration larger than 24 s (99.0 %) and less than 24 s (65.3 %), respectively. Comparing with actual feed intake obtained by direct weighting, increasing response time greatly increased the recorded feed intake, with the greatest difference occurring at 6 s of response time (P = 0.001). Although increasing time interval after response time linearly increased mean, median feed intake per visit and 10-h feed intake (P < 0.01), it had little influence on 10-h feed intake (< 0.1 %) and eating visit (< 5%). In summary, setting 0.3 s of response time in monitoring system helps to get actual feed intake, but can obtain a lot of non-eating visits. Increasing response time helps to decrease the recording of non-eating visits, but can overestimate feed intake.