FarmDain, a Decision Support System for Dairy Sheep and Goat Production

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Nowadays, there is a tendency for intensification in the sheep and goat sector to achieve higher production levels while improving farms’ profitability. Towards this end, the adoption of advanced technology is considered imperative. In this regard, we developed FarmDain, a novel web-based application for sheep and goat farming to help decision-making towards efficient farm management and planning in the dairy production value chain. In this study, FarmDain was used by a Dairy Factory which collaborates with over 100 dairy sheep and goat farms. In the presented case study, based on the reports provided by the app, feeding, culling and genetic selection decisions were made, improving overall farms’ performance and profitability. ABSTRACT: Managing a milk zone in the dairy industry is demanding. Data necessary for efficient management are difficult to acquire because they usually must be collected in organized and standardized ways. On the other hand, software practices constantly provide new tools that can go beyond simple record-keeping practices and add value to the data. In this work, FarmDain is a novel web-based application for sheep and goat management. It aims to improve milk production and processing by digitizing the value chain in data acquisition, processing and visualization between dairy production businesses and their milk suppliers. FarmDain uses state-of-the-art software technologies to model the data collection process and provides a straightforward user interface to facilitate data processing and visualization. Using the app in a case study carried out for 12 months in a dairy sheep farm resulted in lower feeding cost per milked ewe by 5.5% when ewes were allocated into high and low milk production groups compared to the scenario of remaining in one single group. Furthermore, based on reports provided by the app, culling and genetic selection decisions were made to improve the overall farm performance. Similar practices were applied in all farms optimizing their productivity, which led to increased profitability for farms and the Dairy Factory.