AUTOMAZIONE DELLA PREPARAZIONE E DISTRIBUZIONE DI RAZIONI COMPLETAMENTE MISCELATE (TMR) O UNIFEED PER BOVINE DA LATTE: POSSIBILITA' TECNOLOGICHE E RICADUTE PRODUTTIVE, GESTIONALI ED ECONOMICHE

Feeding Total Mixed Rations (TMR) has become a common practice for dairy cows as a result of the benefits for the animals and the labour savings for farmers. Characteristic for this feeding system are the man-operated mechanical mixers. Besides the advantages of the TMR technique, it has the same drawback as most traditional ad-libitum feeding systems that the discharge of feed is limited to once, maximum twice a day. During the last 5-8 years, technologies for automatically feeding cows with TMR have grown in popularity. Almost 20 manufacturers are working worldwide on different designs for automatic feeding systems (AFS) while an estimated 400-500 farms have adopted this technology, mostly located in Northern Europe, Canada and Japan. The different manufacturers offer a wide range of technical solutions. Some of the most important aspects that characterize these systems include the possibility of a high frequency to distribute the ration, to control the feeding times, to stimulate the cow activity and to manage the composition of the total daily ration with the objective to control the feed intake. The management possibilities and the quality of work seem to be strongly affected by the concepts of the technical solutions that are now available. The thesys discusses, in Chapter 1, the physiologic aspects affecting the possibility of mechanize the feeding operations of dairy cows. In Chapter 2 the different automatic feeding technolgies have been analyzed and classified for the first time. In Chapter 3 the results of a survey involving the Wageningen University and carried out in 22 Dutch farms that use automatic systems for milking and feeding cows have been described. In Chapter 4 an assessment of the main functional parameters of AFSs such as mixing uniformity, physical composition of the ration and cows behaviour has been reported. In Chapter 5 the thesis reports the economic analisys related to the introduction of AFS and the first problems encountered leading to propose further research actions.