Abstract
It is widely known that labor costs are continuously and rapidly growing in terms of the raw cost of products in Korea. The increased labor costs are degrading the competitiveness of dairy industry sector as in the other major industrial fields. Furthermore, the number of dairy farms is constantly decreasing while that of dairy cattle is increasing. Thus, mechanized and/or automated stockbreeding management systems are crucially required to support professional stockbreeding management, as well as to enhance the productivity of the sector. Hence this paper develops an IIS (Integrated Information System) for dairy cattle stockbreeding management. IIS is composed of five application modules and associated utility programs. The five modules are individual stock management, milking management, feeding management, propagation management, and disease management. The utility programs are involved in stock farm accounting, and handy unloading of individual stock data into a personal data acquisition device. Compared with existing foreign products, the developed system takes advantages of various stock body measurement data such as body weight, body temperature, milk conductivity, milking amount, and the number of walking steps. All the measured data are transmitted into a programmable logic controller that monitors and controls measurement devices. The transmitted data are finally aggregated into an integrated database located in the main personal computer. The integrated data are analyzed and reformed in the five modules of IIS, then, used for providing farmers with various farm states and information through application module scenes. Hence, IIS keeps the each module work in a systematic and compatible manner, while supervising the whole stockbreeding management system.
