Oestrus in dairy cattle has changed over the last decades; the intensity of oestrus has declined and the duration decreased. Several studies have shown that not all dairy cows stand to be mounted, and that oestrus expression in many cases may be characterized by other behaviours. The aim of this study was to investigate oestrus behaviour in a herd of todays? high producing dairy cattle. The study was carried out at Jälla naturbruksgymnasium in Uppsala during one week in January 2011.

The dairy cow?s ability to resume estrus after calving and to conceive is affected by their metabolic status after calving. For high yielding cows there is a high risk that the feed intake will not be sufficient to cope with the increased energy demands after calving, and the cow will end up in a state of negative energy balance. Energy balance can be measured in various ways, for example by body condition score or by plasma concentration of several metabolic hormones and metabolites. After calving, endocrine pathways stimulate tissue mobilization; insulin signaling is blocked, the concentration of insulin-like growth factor-1(IGF-1) and leptin decreases, and the concentration of growth hormone (GH) increases.

Today?s feeding methods can determine the domestic pig?s abilities to fulfill basic behavioral needs, such as foraging, and the way in which pigs are feed is an important aspect. Feed does not only provide the energy and nutrients critical for survival, but feeding is also associated with a number of other factors contributing to well-being and reproduction. Today the feed for gestated sows is often composed by high energy and low dietary fiber grain products such as wheat. Three kg of this kind of feed can often be consumed by the sow within 20 minutes.

To enjoy the richness of the grazing cows and high yield during the summers, even during the winter, cheese has been the way to store milk for thousands of years. Nowadays yield is high all year around and the cheese production is possible during all seasons. The aim of this paper is to investi-gate how and why the seasons influence taste and texture of pressed and ripened cheese. Milk is composed of proteins, fat, lactose and water but contains also a lot of vitamins. The quality of milk is very important for the final constitution of cheese.

Research where personality in animals is studied is becoming more and more common. In this area there are different concepts like behavioural syndrome and animal personality and they usually talk about consistency in behaviour over time and situations. This consistent individual behaviour can be used as an indicator of how individuals can handle and adjust to new situations in the environment. Because of this, personality studies in animals are very important in animal welfare. In this study personality in dairy cattle in lose housing were studied.

Swedish horse breeders have generally very few mares producing a few foals a year and the breeders have relatively few traditions, little knowledge and experience to breed foals successfully. It is therefore important to provide adequate information about new findings in horse nutrition. However, there is not much research about feeding the suckling foal to ensure a sound growth. Current feeding recommendations in the literature seems to be different. This gives a confusing message and the information is difficult to apply. This paper reviews some publications in the area of feeding the suckling and weaning foal. Most authors stress that it?s important to start feeding the foal early in life.

Claw diseases are common diseases in modern dairy production. They are painful for the cow and costly for the producer. Differences in the prevalence of claw disease depending on housing system have previously been observed. This raises the question if there are genotype by environment (GxE) interactions for claw diseases in different housing systems. To investigate this claw trimming records for Swedish Red dairy cattle (SR) and Swedish Holstein cows (SH) were retrieved from the Swedish Dairy Association.

The object with this work was to create a simple feeding program for beef cows. Another object was that I could learn more about the properties and functions of Excel and Visual Basic. I used parts of a program I designed a few years ago. This old program was neither user friendly nor had it an appealing layout. Initially I decided how I wanted the new program to appear and on which foundation it should be built. I designed various forms into a spread sheet, such as lists and multiple choice buttons. Using VBA (Visual Basic for Application) I could create macros, which used the information chosen in the lists and with the multiple choices to calculate the feeding requirement or the feeding plan.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the cow-level association between acute hoof lesions and the somatic milk cell count in dairy cattle. Cows from three loose-housed Swedish dairy herds were enrolled in the study if they had an acute hoof lesion treated by a veterinarian or professional hoof trimmer during the preceding year, according to farmer records. Studied lesions were sole ulcer, dermatitis, interdigital necrobacillosis and hoof abscess, in each case causing lameness. For each hoof-diseased cow, 0 to 3 healthy cows were included, matched with respect to herd, breed, parity and lactation stage. Cell counts were obtained from monthly test recordings from one month before to three months after the hoof-lesion diagnosis, and log-transformed.

The study was carried out at the Kungsängen Research Centre, Department of Animal Nutrition and Management, Swedish University of Agriculture Sciences, Uppsala. The technical development in dairy production has resulted in a housing system where feeding and milking is done automatically without human contact, a so called automatic milking system. The motives for utilising an automatic milking system, is to increase the animal welfare and to decrease the need for manual labour. However, the system does involve a change for the animals, among the effects is the deprival or the diminishment of a chance for synchronous behaviour and the animals have to agree among themselves in which order they use the feeding stations and the milking unit itself. How and if this affects the animals well-being and production is yet to be solved. A possible way to form an opinion on this, is to study the animals ranking order along with hormone profiles and production. The purpose of this work was to study the effect of low- vs.

The aim of the study was to find repetitive behavioral patterns pre calving that could be used as indications of calving in beef cattle. In the study sixteen Standing- and lying down sensors were attached to the leg of sixteen beef cows. Ten of the sixteen beef cows gave birth to calves during the trial period. From these ten cows, data from six cows were used to assess the sensors fitness for use as calving indicators. The analytical part of the experiment was divided into two parts, calculation of divergence of mean lying time within different time intervals, and the number of lying bouts.The first part consisted of optimization of an equation used to highlight divergence in mean lying time within eight different time intervals (3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21 and 24 hours).

The Swedish beef cattle population is growing when the dairy cattle become fewer. The fertility of the beef cows is important for the profitability in beef cattle production. Today there is no genetic evaluation for female fertility in Swedish beef cows. The purpose of this study was to see if calving interval can be used in the genetic evaluation as a measure of female fertility in beef cows. For this purpose the variation in calving interval for beef cows of different breeds and ages registred in KAP was studied.

AbstractHerbivores can be classified into either hiders or followers depending on their postpartum behaviour. The two behaviour types affect the spatial relationship between the mother and her infant. Goats are seen as hiders, although the environment plays a central role when it comes to the behaviour. Therefore, in the first part of this study the aim was to investigate how the goat kids? spatial relationship changed in the transition from indoor housing to pasture.

This project is based on my fathers farm which lays outside Löberöd, twenty kilometres south of Eslöv in Skåne. While my family for some time have thought about building a new milkingstable with AMS(Automatic milking system) I decided to compare the AMS with a conventional milkingstable. We are abit concerned about how many cows we should have in the new stable. Because of that I calculated with two different number of cows. I have compared three different types of milking stables: One alternative is 180 cows milked in a double eigth hearing bone milking stable. The second alternative is 128 cows milked with two DeLaval VMS-robots. The third alternative is 171 cows milked with three DeLaval VMS-robots. One salesman from DeLaval and one salesman from A-betong helped me to get marketprices on the milkingrobots, building, ventilation and prices on all the concrete. In all the costs labour is included. The rest of the costs are calculated in a softwareprogram called K-data 03 which is a program with predicted costs. The calulations from the program showed that the price in the milkingpit system was 51 000 sek per cow.

Cows affected by mastitis caused by Klebsiella (K.) pneumoniae often become seriously ill. In some cases herdproblems may occur. Contaminated bedding material is considered to be one of the most common risk factors for klebsiella mastitis. In a recently performed study in USA it was found, however, that more than 80 % of healthy, lactating dairy cows excreted K. pneumoniae in faeces.