The Southern Alberta Holstein Club is having an Information/discussion evening with Ali Naqvi and Diego Nobrega from the U of C on February 7th, 2019 @ 8:00pm at Jola Holsteins, the DeLange Family. They will be presenting some of their research, below is more information on them, and on their research.
GETTING THERE
Jola Holsteins
Hwy 2 exit Bowden road 584 W, S on Rg Rd 15 to 34226, on W side last farm before Twp 342
Ali Naqvi
Having grown up in Toronto, Ali first started working with dairy cattle doing research on different methods of heat detection with the Animal Reproduction Lab at the University of British Columbia in 2014. He moved to Calgary in 2015 to work with Dr. Herman Barkema on developing a better understanding of mastitis in heifers – risk factors, and management practices that may improve udder health. In the last year he has switched gears into focusing on detection of mastitis in robot systems and designing machine learning models that can enable earlier detection and treatment to minimize long-term consequences of clinical cases.
Diego Nobrega
Diego is a PhD. candidate working with Dr. Herman Barkema in the Department of Production Animal Health. Diego has a DVM, MSc. and a doctorate degree, and most of his work is related to antimicrobial resistance of bacteria isolated from food producing animals. Currently, Diego is studying genetic mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance, and associations between antimicrobial use and resistance in dairy herds and in human communities.
Heifer Mastitis
- Importance of heifer mastitis and consequences of poor udder health in early first lactation
- Udder health in Canadian heifers – rates of clinical mastitis, subclinical mastitis and udder infections in the first month of lactation
- Pre-calving preventive treatment for improving udder health after calving
a. Types of treatments
b. Effectiveness of treatments
c. How to choose the best treatment
Automated detection of mastitis in farms with robots
- Increased adoption of automated milking systems in Canada and their effect on udder health
- Evaluating the effectiveness of mastitis detection and the different demands for conventional milking vs. automated milking systems
- Deep learning – applications and examples
- Recurrent neural networks for detection of mastitis – time frame of detection, accuracy, false alerts, missed cows
- Improving models, optimizing them for effective and practical on-farm application
Antimicrobial use in dairy herds
- Efficacy of the different antimicrobials available for treating clinical and subclinical mastitis
- How to choose an antimicrobial according to bacteria and disease presentation