Miel Hostens

Miel Hostens is the Robert and Anne Everett Associate Professor of Digital Dairy Management and Data Analytics in the Department of Animal Science and a visiting professor at Ghent University’s Lab for Animal Nutrition and Animal Product Quality. He focuses on the creation of methodologies using precision dairy farming to monitor sustainable food production systems from a global perspective. 

Miel has a strong personal vision around the need for more data-driven dairy science through research and industry collaborations. He has been involved in multiple projects on data-driven agriculture and precision dairy farming in various countries around the world.

In 2013, a prototype of an analytical data pipeline and data warehouse architecture he had developed during his PhD was acquired by Delaval, one of the largest milking equipment manufacturers in the world, which was subsequently merged into DairyDataWarehouse.com. 

Research Focus

The Hostens lab focuses on developing data-driven dairy science with the goal of eventually contributing to sustainable food production systems from a global perspective.

Here are some of the lab's projects:

DECIDE, is a five-year Horizon 2020 project running from 2021 to 2025. It will develop data-driven decision support tools that offer robust and early signals of disease emergence and options for diagnostic confirmation. Moreover, options will be provided for controlling the disease along with their implications in terms of disease spread, economic burden and animal welfare.

VEERKRACHT/Resilience – The transition period as a window and metabolic resilience to monitoring of dairy cattle, granted by national Belgian VLAIO 2018, is a project that aims to create tools to monitor the transition success of dairy cows at the individual level and herd level. These tools allow the farmer to monitor individual animals at risk, in addition to allowing individualized preventive measures. This will reduce the development of transition associated problems, which will increase productivity and animal welfare.

In the SUMMERFAIR project (SUMmarizing ducationial transmission data to Enable data Reanalysis and predictions by FAIR data use) we tackled the issue of lack of a common terminology and need for repetition of costly experiments by developing a shared vocabulary (domain-ontology) and a workflow enabling reuse and combination of transmission data. The project ran from 2021-2022 and was granted by the Dutch ZoNMW.

GplusE was an FP7 project funded by the European Union. It was a five-year project from 2014 and 2018 executed by 15 research and industry partners. The project covered the interaction between genotype and environment contributing to the sustainability of dairy cow production systems. This was achieved through the optimal integration of genomic selection and novel management protocols based on the development and exploitation of genomic data and supporting novel phenotyping approaches.

Outreach and Activities

• Member of the American Dairy Science Association
• Member of the Dutch Veterinary Association
• Member of the Flemish Veterinary Association
• Member of steering committee of the 2016 ADSA Discover Conference on Big Data for Dairy (Chicago, USA)
• Applied Data Science ambassador at Utrecht University
•  Open Science Fellows FAIR data and software at Utrecht University
• Active member of the ‘Dairy Cattle Milk Recording Working Group’ of the International Committee for Animal Recording
• Guest editor for the special issue ‘Towards Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in the Farm-to-Fork Industry’ in the Applied Science MDPI journal
• Board member framework development of the Master in Veterinary Medicine – v2022, at Utrecht University