research project

GenTORE


This EU Horizon 2020 project is all about increasing the resilience of cattle to an increasingly changing environment. With a combination of more extreme weather events caused by global warming and a historical focus on breeding mostly to increase production efficiency, it is critical that cattle breeders have the tools to be able to also breed for resilience. 

Precision livestock phenotyping is a critical element in developing such tools. We need to be able to efficiently measure various aspects of cows' health, welfare and behaviors in a variety of circumstances, both indoors in an intensive farm in the cowshed and outdoors with extensive grazing on the mountain.


Gentore logo met wit aan de zijkant

The role of Noldus

Noldus is one of the partners developing tools for precision livestock phenotyping. We will develop sensor fusion technologies to combine data from multiple sensors to create robust measures for relevant behaviors of the cows and embed that in our TrackLab software.

More information


Partners

This project is led by the French research organization INRA. There are 20 other partners including Europe's leading agricultural universities, farm animal breeders and SMEs.

Funding

This project is funded by the Horizon 2020 research program of the European Union under grant number 727213.


Horizon 2020

Flyer

GenTore flyer

GenTORE Farm Resilience & Efficiency Dashboard

Noldus has developed a demonstration software tool. This is available to anyone interested, by filling in the form linked at the bottom of this page. This has been done in collaboration with Raft Solutions (UK), the University of Padova (IT) and Wageningen University & Research (NL). The dashboard combines information from different data sources, allows for monitoring resilience and efficiency and benchmarking, and also allows users to dive into more detailed information in four major areas of interest (portals). This gives a solid basis for the development of a dashboard after the GenTORE project has finished. As well as the possibility of including further indicators within each of the four main dashboard portals (Health, Fertility, Production, and Herd Inventory), there is a wide possibility for benchmarking with different outputs and interpretations.

Herd data can be compared with several points of reference, for example:

  • Gold standards, allowing evaluation of the herd performances, prioritization of the areas for improvement, planning for specific interventions, monitoring of improvements over time
  • National data, allowing comparison of the herd's resilience and efficiency with the national situation and therefore a ranking of the herd
  • Data from comparable herds, for instance from the same region or farms with similar management (organic or conventional). This allows comparison within the regional situation and with respect to specific regional challenges such as heat stress.

The software is a beta version. Its quality is lower than a commercial product with respect to robustness and errors. Nevertheless, it still shows what a dashboard could look like for the inspiration of stakeholders. The Dashboard software is a web application developed using the Microsoft Blazor framework.

If you would like a copy of the software, please fill in the contact form and mention the GenTORE software from Noldus' R&D department.