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Modelling temperature effects on milk production: a study on Holstein cows at a Japanese farm

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posted on 2016-04-21, 09:17 authored by Machiko Yano, Hideyasu Shimadzu, Toshiki Endo
Milk yield and its composition vary according to individual cows as well as to a variety of different environment conditions, such as temperature. Previous studies suggest that heat exerts considerable negative effects on milk production and its composition, especially during summer months. We investigate the production and fat composition of milk from individual dairy cows and develop a modelling framework that investigates the effect of temperature by extending a traditional lactation curve model onto a more flexible statistical modelling framework, a generalised additive model (GAM). The GAM simultaneously copes with multiple different conditions (temperature, parity, days of lactation, etc.), and, importantly, their non-linear relationships. Our analysis of retrospective data suggests that individual cows respond differently to heat; cows producing relatively high quantities of milk tend to be particularly sensitive to heat. Our model also suggests that most dairy cows studied fall into three distinct cases that underpin the variation of the milk fat ratio by different mechanisms.

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School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematical Sciences

Published in

SpringerPlus

Volume

3

Issue

1

Pages

1 - 11

Citation

YANO, M., SHIMADZU, H. and ENDO, T., 2014. Modelling temperature effects on milk production: a study on Holstein cows at a Japanese farm. SpringerPlus, 3 (1), 129.

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Springer / © The Authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Unported (CC BY 2.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Publication date

2014

Notes

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

eISSN

2193-1801

Language

  • en

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