Designing and evaluating a smart cow monitoring system from a techno-economic perspective

Currently, precision dairy-monitoring technologies (PDMT) are gaining interest. These systems allow to monitor cow health, the time for insemination, and the birthing process. Doing so, they have the potential to reduce labor and management costs whilst increasing milk yield. Continuous innovations in the field of Internet of Things (IoT) have opened many new opportunities for monitoring animals and have been speeding up the development of PDMT systems. When designing an IoT-system, often various technological alternatives are available (e.g. communication technologies, types of sensors). Although this choice set can be narrowed down by mapping the functional and technical requirements on the technical specifications of the technologies, chances are that even after this step multiple alternatives are still feasible. In this work, we describe an IoT-system design methodology that also takes into account strategic and economic considerations. As a result, the choice set of feasible technologies can be limited to feasible alternatives that are also the most economic and strategic choices. In addition we describe how the total added value of such a PDMT can be quantified from the perspective of a dairy farmer. Applying this quantification methodology on the described PDMT system indicates an annual reduction of 250 EUR per cow for dairy management costs.