dairy.js is a JavaScript library covering routines to simulate dairy cow herds on a daily timestep through the lifespan of an animal for both productive cows and young stock.
- milk yield and solids
- requirements (different systems: DE, FI, FR, GB)
- feed evaluation (different systems: DE, FI, FR, GB)
- intake (INRA)
- growth and mobilization
- grouping
- herd structure
- diet (LP/glpk.js)
Examples and use-case tested with the latest (09.2014) Firefox & Chrome browser are available at http://jvail.github.io/dairy.js/ and https://jvail.github.io/solid-dss/. We welcome any contribution to the library (e.g. adding other ruminants like sheep and/or other evaluation systems).
The library was initially developed to be used in a DSS to simulate low-input and organic dairy herds. Therefore some parts (e.g. mobilization&reconstitution) might not be suitable for highly productive cows. Since the DSS's application is located somewhere inbetween science&extension the code contains many empirical functions which are - by nature - limited in scope.
Potential use cases range from simulation, decision support, education, rapid model prototyping or scientific modeling in the field of agriculture. We tried to keep the code structure as simple as possible to make it easy to re-use, modify only parts and use them in any environment (web, web-worker, Node.js).
Vaillant, J. and Baldinger, L. 2016. Application note: An open-source JavaScript library to simulate dairy cows and young stock, their growth, requirements and diets Computers and Electronics in Agriculture, Volume 120, January 2016, Pages 7–9
Baldinger, L., J. Vaillant, W. Zollitsch and M. Rinne (2015). Making a decision-support system for dairy farmers usable throughout Europe: the challenge of feed evaluation. Advances in Animal Biosciences, 6, pp 3-5. doi:10.1017/S2040470014000387.
Distributed under the MIT License. See accompanying file LICENSE.
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement No. FP7-266367 (SOLID).