In this study, to improve the quality of a live attenuated vaccine for duck viral hepatitis (DHV), the lyophilization of a heat-resistant duck hepatitis virus vaccine was optimized. The optimized heat protectors were made of 10% sucrose, 1.2% pullulan, 0.5% PVP, and 1% arginine, etc., with a titer freeze-drying loss of ≤0.50 Lg. The vaccine product’s valence measurements demonstrated the following: the vaccine could be stored at 2–8 °C for 18 months with a virus titer loss ≤0.91 Lg; at 37 °C for 10 days with a virus valence loss ≤0.89 Lg; and at 45 °C for 3 days with a virus titer loss ≤0.90 Lg. Regarding safety, no deaths occurred in two-day-old ducklings immunized with a 10 times dose vaccine; their energy, diet, and weight gain were all normal, demonstrating that the DHV heat-resistant vaccines were safe for ducklings and did not cause any immune side effects. Duck viral hepatitis freeze-dried vaccine began to produce antibodies at 7 d after immunization, reached above 5.0 on 14 d, and reached above 7.0 on 21 d, showing a continuous upward trend. This indicates that duck viral hepatitis vaccine has a good immunogen level. The optimization of the freeze-drying process saves costs and also improves the quality of the freeze-drying products, which provides important theoretical and technical support for the further study of vaccine products.

In order to mitigate the concentration of NH₃ and greenhouse gases (GHGs: CO₂, N₂O, CH₄) in livestock houses, two experiments, one determining the ideal manure removal frequency by cleaning the feces from a livestock house once, twice, three, and four times a day, and one in which microbial deodorant and VenaZn deodorant were sprayed, were conducted in a rabbit breeding house. The NH₃, CO₂, N₂O, and CH₄ concentrations were monitored continuously with an Innova 1512 photoacoustic gas monitor during the experiments. The results were as follows: the manure removal frequency had a significant impact on the average concentrations of NH₃, CO₂, and CH₄ in the rabbit house. Cleaning the feces in the rabbit breeding house two to three times a day significantly reduced the NH₃ concentration, and, on the contrary, cleaning the feces four times a day increased the NH₃ concentration in rabbit house; increasing the manure removal frequency significantly reduced the concentrations of CO₂ and CH₄ in the rabbit house. Considering the average concentrations of NH₃, CO₂, N₂O, and CH₄ in the rabbit house and economic cost, it was better to remove feces twice a day. The average NH₃ and CO₂ concentration declined significantly within 3 days in the summer and winter; the N₂O concentration declined within 3 days in the summer but did not decline in the winter; and there was no effect on the CH₄ concentration in the summer and in the winter after spraying the rabbit house with microbial deodorant. Therefore, it was better to spray microbial deodorant twice a week on Monday and Thursday to reduce the NH₃, CO₂, and N₂O concentrations in rabbit houses. The NH₃, CO₂, N₂O, and CH₄ concentrations first showed a decreasing trend and then an increasing trend over 5 days in the summer and 7 days in the winter after VenaZn deodorant was sprayed in the rabbit house, and the NH₃, CO₂, N₂O, and CH₄ concentrations on day 3 and day 4 were significantly lower than they were on the other days.

The effects of sorbic acid, ethanol, previously fermented juice and their combined additives on fermentation quality and residual water-soluble carbohydrates (WSC) of napiergrass (Pennisetum purpureum) were herein investigated. There were two experiments in total. The treatments of experiment 1 were as follows: control (no addition); sorbic acid at 0.1%, S; molasses at 1.0%, M; previously fermented juice at 5 mL/kg, P; SP; SM; SPM. The treatments of experiment 2 were as follows: control (no addition); ethanol at 1.5%, E; molasses at 1.0%, M; previously fermented juice at 5 mL/kg, P; EM; EP; EPM. The laboratory silos (10 L) were kept at room temperature (~25 °C), and opened after 120 days of ensiling and the chemical compositions of silage were analyzed. Sorbic acid addition significantly (p < 0.05) decreased the silage pH and increased the residual WSC and lactic acid (LA) contents as compared with control. Ethanol addition decreased pH, acetic acid (AA) and volatile fatty acids (VFAs) contents, and increased the ratio of LA/AA, LA and residual WSC contents. Molasses addition increased ratios of LA/AA and enhanced WSC content used by lactic acid bacteria (LAB). The PFJ addition increased AA and ammonia nitrogen/total nitrogen (AN/TN) and decreased the LA contents. Comparing the fermentation quality among all silages in the present study, the combined additives SM and EM performed best in improving the silage quality of napiergrass.

In view of the low accuracy and slow speed of goat-face recognition in real breeding environments, dairy goats were taken as the research objects, and video frames were used as the data sources. An improved YOLOv4 goat-face-recognition model was proposed to improve the detection accuracy; the original backbone network was replaced by a lightweight GhostNet feature extraction network. The pyramid network of the model was improved to a channel management mechanism with a spatial pyramid structure. The path aggregation network of the model was improved into a fusion network with residual structure in the form of double parameters, in order to improve the model’s ability to detect fine-grained features and distinguish differences between similar faces. The transfer learning pre-training weight loading method was adopted, and the detection speed, the model weight, and the mean average precision (mAP) were used as the main evaluation indicators of the network model. A total of 2522 images from 30 dairy goats were augmented, and the training set, validation set, and test set were divided according to 7:1:2. The test results of the improved YOLOv4 model showed that the mAP reached 96.7%, and the average frame rate reached 28 frames/s in the frontal face detection. Compared with the traditional YOLOv4, the mAP improved by 2.1%, and the average frame rate improved by 2 frames/s. The new model can effectively extract the facial features of dairy goats, which improves the detection accuracy and speed. In terms of profile face detection, the average detection accuracy of the improved YOLOv4 goat-face-recognition network can reach 78%. Compared with the traditional YOLOv4 model, the mAP increased by 7%, which effectively demonstrated the improved profile recognition accuracy of the model. In addition, the improved model is conducive to improving the recognition accuracy of the facial poses of goats from different angles, and provides a technical basis and reference for establishing a goat-face-recognition model in complex situations.

Background: Pseudorabies vaccines based on the live attenuated PRV Bartha-K61 strain remain essential for controlling pseudorabies in swine, but poor thermal stability during storage and transport limits field use. Objectives: This study aimed to develop a thermostable freeze-dried live pseudorabies vaccine through the integrated optimization of formulation and lyophilization and to preliminarily assess its humoral immunogenicity in piglets. Methods: Trehalose, mannitol, and glycine were screened as candidate lyoprotectants by single-factor experiments, followed by Box–Behnken response surface optimization using viral titer retention as the response. Critical thermal parameters were determined to establish a formulation-specific lyophilization cycle. Product quality was evaluated by post-lyophilization titer, cake appearance, residual moisture, and electron microscopy, and stability was compared with a commercial freeze-dried vaccine at 2–8 °C, 25 °C, 37 °C, and 45 °C. Conclusions: The optimized formulation, ST005, contained 9.5% trehalose, 2.0% mannitol, and 1.5% glycine. It showed a collapse-related critical temperature of approximately −34.0 °C and a dried-product glass transition temperature of 69.1 °C, produced an intact cake with residual moisture below 3.0%, and preserved viral morphology after lyophilization. Titer loss remained below 1.0 log10 TCID₅₀/mL for 24 months at 2–8 °C, 9 months at 25 °C, 21 days at 37 °C, and 9 days at 45 °C, outperforming the commercial comparator. In PRV-seronegative piglets, stored ST005 induced robust gB-specific and neutralizing antibody responses after storage under refrigerated, ambient, and accelerated conditions.