Sustainable Measures for Assessing the Impact of Climate Effects on Livestock Biological Variability

The aim of the present work was to deploy sustainable and sensor-based measures to assess the influence of climatic parameters such as environmental temperature (ET), relative humidity (RH), thermic excursion (ET) and temperature-humidity index (THI) on milk quantity and quality of two different dairy species (buffalo and cow) reared in the same farm. The climatic parameters were recorded daily through a weather station located inside the commercial dairy farm, while milk quantity (ECM) and quality parameters - such as fat (FP) and protein (PP) percentages, and somatic cell count (SCC) - were recovered monthly from test days. For each species a distinct Spearman analysis was carried out. The results denoted cows were more prone to heat stress compared to buffaloes, probably because of the tropical origin of the latter species. Moreover, in Holstein cows, ECM had strong negative correlations with weather data (p < 0.01). However, the correlations were very low for FP, PP and SCC and climatic parameters for both species. The findings reported in this study, although suggesting the reliability of IoT for animal welfare purposes in the dairy sector, highlight the importance of further studies to be performed to assess and validate new THI levels proper of buffalo species.