1. Economic Evaluation of Automatic Heat Detection Systems in Dairy Farming

Although heat detection makes a relevant contribution to good reproduction performance of dairy cattle, available studies on the economic evaluations of automatic heat detection systems are limited. Therefore, the objective of this article is to provide an economic evaluation of using automatic heat detection. The effect of different heat detection rates on gross margin is modelled with SimHerd (SimHerd A/S, Denmark). The analysis considers all additional investment costs in automatic heat detection.... J. Pfeiffer, M. Gandorfer, J.F. Ettema