Electronics :: Cellsense

Background

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Greenfield Robotic milking Project
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The beginnings of the development of CellSense™ can be traced back to 2000 and the start-up activity of a small Hamilton based company called Sensortec. The CEO of the company, Rod Claycomb, emphasises that Sensortec was the first company in the world created to focus solely on the development of sensors to analyse raw milk on-line.

"I guess that whole process of evolution of CellSense™ really started from us looking at the dairy industry and identifying the biggest problems that the industry faced. There seemed to be two big problems in the industry which we could work on with sensor technology – one being fertility management and the other the mastitis problem in cows."

Rod started on the problem by going straight to the market. He set up a series of discussion groups up and down the country.

"We invited people from all over the industry. Not just the farmers, but veterinarians, consultants, representatives from the processing companies, milk quality officers ...all the stakeholders."

Each group was asked about their perceptions of the technology that was currently being used on the dairy farm. What did they feel were the best brands and why? How did they think the future of dairy technology would evolve? What were their biggest needs? How did they see the future of the New Zealand dairy industry?

"From that feedback we were able to confidently focus on the mastitis issue and formulate our first R&D plan. At the time we didn't know a lot about mastitis – my expertise was in fertility and the rest of the people in the team were engineers, so the first challenge was to find out more about this thing ... and how we could measure it. Lots of people mentioned somatic cell count (SCC) in the same breath as mastitis and lots mentioned conductivity. We knew they had something to do with each other – but we didn't know a whole lot about it."

The company had an established network of contacts around the world in the dairy industry and in the dairy research field so were able to immediately engage with a range of experts, "to start picking their brains ...and to try and figure things out ..." as Rod says. And out of that research grew what Sensortec calls its 'Cause-Effect Spectrum for Mastitis'.

"In its simplest form, the root cause of mastitis in cows is the end of the teat getting exposed to bacteria. They enter the gland and start to replicate and the immune system of the cow gets triggered. The tissue starts to get damaged if the infection is not successfully fought off, and once the tissue gets damaged it leads to tissue breakdown in the gland. This leads to clinical symptoms of the disease – which can eventually lead to the death of the animal, if you don't treat it."

At each stage of that cause-effect spectrum there are markers in the milk that can be detected and measured using sensors, and the further back you go towards the start of the spectrum the more specific you get in measuring the root cause, bacterial infection.

When Sensortec started its development process the 'state of the art' at that time was bulk conductivity measurement in milk. Sensortec joined with Dexcel in the Greenfield Robotic Milking project in 2001 and, in partnership with Fusion Electronics (The Netherlands), successfully developed its 'quarter conductivity' measuring system. This incorporated unique software developments and eliminated non-mastitic variables which can significantly affect the milk conductivity reading. By focussing on increases in conductivity related solely to tissue damage within the cow's udder it provided a reliable tool for the early detection of mastitis. This new technology is licensed to Fullwood Ltd (UK), branded FullQuest and integrated into Fullwood's Crystal herd management system to be used as part of their Merlin range of robotic milking machines.

The original New Zealand-based focus group discussions in 2000 and a follow-up international round of discussions in 2002 had emphasised the importance of somatic cell count (SCC) as a global industry standard for measuring both milk quality and animal health.

SCC provides a very good indicator of the presence of sub-clinical mastitis which often goes unnoticed. The white blood cells activated to attack the bacteria, which are the root cause of mastitis, will start to increase the SCC in the milk. As the infection proceeds the SCC will increase rapidly. While indicators such as milk amyloid A or lactate are earlier indicators of infection, SCC is still the industry standard at the moment.

It quickly became obvious that measurement of SCC had to be the number one focus for the company in order to get to an end product which could best suit the needs of the huge international dairy market.

With the direction established attention turned to developing the sensor technology which could measure an increase in SCC accurately and reliably.