Tracking individual animals within large groups is increasingly possible, offering an exciting opportunity to researchers. Whereas previously only relatively indistinguishable groups of individual animals could be observed and combined into pen level data, we can now focus on individual actors within these large groups and track their activities across time and space with minimal intervention and disturbance. The development is particularly relevant to the poultry industry as, due to a shift away from battery cages, flock sizes are increasingly becoming larger and environments more complex. Many efforts have been made to track individual bird behavior and activity in large groups using a variety of methodologies with variable success. Of the technologies in use, each has associated benefits and detriments, which can make the approach more or less suitable for certain environments and experiments. Within this article, we have divided several tracking systems that are currently available into two major categories (radio frequency identification and radio signal strength) and review the strengths and weaknesses of each, as well as environments or conditions for which they may be most suitable. We also describe related topics including types of analysis for the data and concerns with selecting focal birds.

Monitoring systems assist farmers in monitoring the health of dairy cows by predicting behavioral patterns (e.g., lying) and their changes with machine learning models. However, the available systems were developed either for indoors or for pasture and fail to predict the behavior in other locations. Therefore, the goal of our study was to train and evaluate a model for the prediction of lying on a pasture and in the barn. On three farms, 7–11 dairy cows each were equipped with the prototype of the monitoring system containing an accelerometer, a magnetometer and a gyroscope. Video observations on the pasture and in the barn provided ground truth data. We used 34.5 h of datasets from pasture for training and 480.5 h from both locations for evaluating. In comparison, random forest, an orientation-independent feature set with 5 s windows without overlap, achieved the highest accuracy. Sensitivity, specificity and accuracy were 95.6%, 80.5% and 87.4%, respectively. Accuracy on the pasture (93.2%) exceeded accuracy in the barn (81.4%). Ruminating while standing was the most confused with lying. Out of individual lying bouts, 95.6 and 93.4% were identified on the pasture and in the barn, respectively. Adding a model for standing up events and lying down events could improve the prediction of lying in the barn.

The present study investigated the effect of varying trypsin inhibitor activity (TIA) in differently processed soybean expellers on apparent prececal amino acid (AA) digestibility in male broiler chickens. Two different raw soybean batches were treated using varying processing techniques and intensities. In this way, 45 expeller extracted soybean meal (ESBM) variants were created. The processed soybean variants were then merged into a basal diet (160 g/kg crude protein [CP]) at 2 inclusion levels (15%, 30%) resulting in 90 different diets plus one basal diet (0.4 mg/g–8.5 mg/g TIA). All diets contained 0.5% titanium dioxide. A total of 5,460-day-old male broilers (Ross 308) were allocated on d 14 to 546 pens (10 birds/pen) after a starter phase (CP 215 g/kg, 14 g/kg Lysine, 12.5 MJ ME/kg). The 91 experimental diets were fed ad libitum until d 22. Subsequently, birds were euthanized and digesta of the terminal ileum was collected for determination of AA digestibility. TIA depressed the prececal digestibility of every single AA significantly in a straight linear fashion (P < 0.001). Sulfur-containing AA expressed the strongest suppression by TIA with cystine showing the lowest apparent prececal digestibility measured (10.6% at 23.6 mg/g TIA in raw ESBM). The present data demonstrate that TIA severely depresses digestibility of essential and nonessential AA in a straight linear fashion. On the one hand, this questions the usefulness of defined upper limits of TIA in soy products whereas on the other hand, TIA must be considered when testing raw components for their feed protein value in vivo.

With the Weihenstephan funnel nest box, 12 laying hen flocks were tested for their individual laying performance, egg quality, and nesting behavior i

We test a new parametrization of a suitably truncated classically perfect action for SU(2) pure gauge theory with respect to self-consistency and locate the deconfinement transition on a ${12}^3\times 4$ lattice. Using the technique of smoothing (blocking followed by inverse blocking) we demonstrate clustering of action and topological charge density. Concentrating on the Abelian monopoles found in smoothed configurations after Abelian projection from the maximally Abelian gauge, we present evidence for their role as carriers of non-Abelian action and topological charge.

In this study, we compared an innovative stripping technique with a conventional whole plant harvesting technique for alfalfa and red clover to develop an approach to regional production of proteins and amino acids. While the stems were harvested separately, the leaves were fractionated by stripping them from the stems using a prototype machine, which resulted in higher crude protein (CP) and amino acid yield for alfalfa (CP 26.53% of dry matter (DM), in g/kg DM, Lys 16.29, Met 4.45, Cys 3.42, Thr 12.38, Tyr 8.90) and red clover (CP 26.88% of DM, in g/kg DM, Cys 2.65, Met 4.33, Lys 16.09, Thr 12.99, Tyr 9.84). The stripped fraction contained approximately 73% and 82% of the leaf portion for alfalfa and red clover, respectively. In the conventional plant harvesting technique, the crop wilted in the field to approximately 30% of DM resulting in following CP and amino acid contents in the harvested material of alfalfa (CP 20.44% of DM, in g/kg DM, Cys 2.56, Met 3.12, Lys 11.72, Thr 8.98, Tyr 6.24) and red clover(CP 20.31% of DM, in g/kg DM, Cys 2.05, Met 2.98, Lys 11.41, Thr 9.04, Tyr 6.96).