I-CORE (II fase): Innovation in the control of calf rearing

On dairy cattle farms, calves born that are not intended for rearing are usually sold at livestock markets for fattening outside Asturias, with low yields and prices that vary widely throughout the year. This situation affects how the animals are handled on the farm of origin, with a poorer start to their development, more frequent diseases and higher mortality, and prices that remain low.

The project's objectives were to:

• Create a management model that would guarantee a constant and sufficient supply of calves throughout the year.
• Develop and implement on-farm health management protocols and feeding strategies that would improve the body condition and live weight of calves upon entering fattening.
• Develop and implement technological innovations for process control.
• Study the development of a communal fattening facility for the farms participating in the project.

I-CORE was structured around the following areas:

• Cloud platform (WoT): design and implementation of a scalable and interoperable Internet of Things ecosystem, with real-time storage and processing capacity for the data generated by the sensors deployed on the pilot farm.
• Low-cost sensors: development of sensors for monitoring the pilot livestock farm, aimed at capturing real-time information on the condition of the animals.
• Intelligent data analysis: identification of behavior patterns and early detection of diseases from the captured data, considering the production cycle for the first time as a set of interconnected actions.

CTIC's participation focused on designing the technology platform and developing the project's sensors and data analysis capabilities, within an operational group that also included two agricultural and livestock cooperatives, Campoastur and Corvera, with the collaboration of the Asociación de Defensa Ganadera de Valdés.