If you love an ice cream sundae in the summer or a latte while the snow flies, then you know how important it is for dairies to produce milk all year around. But to do that, they have to ensure that their cows become pregnant in a timely manner.
“Dairy cattle reproductive efficiency is critical to ensure consistent milk production and maximize farm profitability,” said Thea Nikolaou, PhD’28 Biomedical Engineering, a member of the lab of David Erickson, professor of mechanical engineering. “This means farmers need to carefully manage the pregnancy status of their cattle.”
But determining a cow’s reproductive status can be difficult for farms with less access to traditional methods. Rectal palpations or ultrasounds can reveal pregnancy, but both require training to carry out and, in the case of ultrasound, expensive equipment. Using laboratory-based tests of milk or blood samples can also be effective, but they can be tedious and could mean longer wait time for the results.
But Nikolaou is working on a technological breakthrough that could put dairy farmers with limited pregnancy-testing access more firmly in the driver’s seat, lowering the difficulty of managing dairy cattle reproduction. Collaborating with the Cornell Agricultural Systems Testbed and Demonstration Site (CAST) for the Farm of the Future, she and the Erickson lab are helping to develop the ReproPhone, an imaging device that lets farmers know a cow’s reproductive status on demand.
