Sustainable Measures for Assessing the Impact of Climate Effects on Livestock Biological Variability

The aim of the present work was to deploysustainable and sensor-based measures to assess the influence ofclimatic parameters such as environmental temperature (ET),relative humidity (RH), thermic excursion (ET) andtemperature-humidity index (THI) on milk quantity and qualityof two different dairy species (buffalo and cow) reared in thesame farm. The climatic parameters were recorded dailythrough a weather station located inside the commercial dairyfarm, while milk quantity (ECM) and quality parameters – suchas fat (FP) and protein (PP) percentages, and somatic cell count(SCC) – were recovered monthly from test days. For eachspecies a distinct Spearman analysis was carried out. The resultsdenoted cows were more prone to heat stress compared tobuffaloes, probably because of the tropical origin of the latterspecies. Moreover, in Holstein cows, ECM had strong negativecorrelations with weather data (p < 0.01). However, thecorrelations were very low for FP, PP and SCC and climaticparameters for both species. The findings reported in this study,although suggesting the reliability of IoT for animal welfarepurposes in the dairy sector, highlight the importance of furtherstudies to be performed to assess and validate new THI levelsproper of buffalo species.