Lely & Rovecom challenge

door | 24 september 2019

The WUR Life Sciences hackathon on the 25 & 26th of October is a 32-hour long event to ignite data- and tech-driven collaborations across boundaries. Students, tech entrepreneurs, researchers, and domain experts work jointly on targeted challenges, side by side with representatives of leading Dutch agribusinesses. In this blogpost Lely and Rovecom present their joint challenge.

 

Feeding Algorithms

 

Bert Alferink works with software and ICT company Rovecom and has farmers’ blood in his veins. He clearly knows what he is talking about when working on software development for optimizing cattle feeding. “A cow’s diet is fully balanced”, Bert explains, “better than my own diet!”

Rovecom feed management software is used by the feed company specialist to compose a total feed plan together with the farmer. The plan is farm-specific and includes recipes for production groups and (depending on the feeding system) individual cows. It takes the nutritional values of the forages produced at the farm as the starting point and then optimizes a top-up of concentrates, taking into account variables like the composition of all ingredients, availability and market prices. Bert: “milk data are a continuous flow of information on cow health. If we succeed to make it a source of learning we can improve feed plans for optimal health.”

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Lisanne de Jong is a mathematician and has worked with Lely for 7 years. Lisanne also grew up on a dairy farm, and this helps in her work. “At present, my work at Lely is to transform data into understandable information that is useful to the farmer and his advisor. It helps that I can visit the home farm – which is managed by my father and younger brother-, and check and test things in practice.” Lisanne is quite excited about the new dataset: “the new dataset will be unique and may really have new insights to offer for feed management of lactating cows.”

Can you help discover the potential of these datasets? Lisanne and Bert, Lely and Rovecom, welcome you to join their challenge!

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