Determining calf traceability and cow–calf relationships in extensive farming using geolocation collars and BLE ear tags

Abstract

Extensive farming is often considered very beneficial to animals for its potential to enhance animal welfare, providing animals with free-range access to their natural environment where they can engage in innate behaviors like grazing and exploration. However, despite these benefits, extensive production still faces welfare and health challenges due to unpredictable weather conditions and limited supervision by stockholders. Moreover, increasing consumer demand for information regarding food quality, safety, and production conditions poses a challenge for extensive farming, where animals are less controlled. Precision livestock farming (PLF) emerges as a possible solution by enabling the continuous real-time monitoring of the health, welfare, and behavior of animals. A novel approach combining geolocation collars for cows and Bluetooth low energy (BLE) ear tags for calves appears promising to enhance traceability and monitoring in extensive farming. Nevertheless, challenges persist, including limitations in the data transmission capacity and associated costs. This study evaluated the effectiveness of combining geolocation collars and BLE ear tags for monitoring calf traceability and cow–calf relationships across three scenarios: 1) Equilibrated: same collar/ear tag ratio; good coverage; 2) intermediate: more collars than ear tags; fair coverage; 3) worst: more ear tags than collars; lousy coverage. Our results indicate that the equilibrated scenario (ES) with an equal number of geolocation collars and BLE ear tags, was the best scenario, demonstrating the highest fix rate (22%) and the longest mean consecutive days of detecting the same ear tag (22.30 days), followed by the intermediate scenario (IS) and the worst scenario. In all scenarios, there was a mean period of 14–15 d without detecting a calf. However, this shortcoming can be overcome as calves usually graze alongside their mothers, ensuring comprehensive traceability in farm breeding. Additionally, by comparing differences in the number of ear tags received from offspring compared to other calves, the BLE ear tags successfully associated every mother with their calf in the ES and IS. Finally, this valuable information, would enable the development of a traceability system that ensures transparency and reliability throughout the supply chain and could allow consumers to access to product information related to animal welfare.