FUZZY SET-BASED ANALYTICAL TOOLS FOR DAIRY HERD IMPROVEMENT

Dairy producers receive large amounts of data from Dairy Herd Improvement agencies on a monthly basis, not only for the purpose of supplying summary statistics, but also as an aid in the detection of management weaknesses. The latter task can be carried out more efficiently by producers and their advisors if aided by decision-support systems, the role of which is to do preliminary data processing. Two software programs were developed to carry out such pre-processing for individual cows in terms of milk yield and persistency. Specifically, these programs analyze both traits as a function of parity, stage of lactation, and herd average production level, and are based on fuzzy sets, which furnish qualitative assessments of the deviations from standard values. This approach has proved to work well, and may be extended to other factors such as peak yield, body condition score and somatic cell count.