The infrastructure for cattle data at the Swedish university of agricultural sciences, Gigacow

Research in animal breeding and precision livestock farming both require vast volumes of highly heterogeneous data, often beyond the capabilities of the universities’ own research farms. To facilitate access to detailed phenotypes from a network of farms, we established the infrastructure for cattle data at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU Gigacow). A main achievement of SLU Gigacow has been the development and implementation of automated daily collection of records from each participating farm’s herd management system to a centralized server at SLU. SLU Gigacow will monitor around 5,000 cows (including annual replacements) when it is fully operational. Although still under development, SLU Gigacow has already received much attention from various stakeholders, as well as media. In the longterm we expect SLU Gigacow to become a valuable infrastructure for discoveries, as well as a testbed for implementation of new technologies.