Mogens Vestergaard
Mogens Vestergaard has 35 years of experience within cattle research at Aarhus University, formerly at the Danish Institue of Animal Science. He is currently holding a dual-position as senior scientist at Aarhus University in Foulum and as a chief scientist/advisor at SEGES in Aarhus. At Aarhus University he works in the Nutrition group in the Department of Animal Science with research within unweaned as well as transition calves, rearing of replacement heifers but most of all with any type of veal and beef production system. So, he has performed research with intensively-fed rosé veal calves, grazing young bulls, organically-reared beef x dairy cattle, and finish feeding of cull dairy cows. He studies nutrition-system interactions, animal performance, health-related aspects, carcass value and quality aspects. He has experience in use of sensors for assessing animal eating and ruminating behavior, automated milk-feeders and Insentec feed bins for recording individual feed intake. Besides that he teach and supervise PhD-, MSc- and BSc-students. At SEGES, he works in the team of Health and Production, and lead more applied projects which includes performing trials at private slaughter calf operations on subjects of immediate relevance for the veal and beef farmers. Recent projects included: Effects of extra water supply to calves; Effects of adjusting milk feeding level before and after shipping calves to beef producers; Effects of natural vitamin E in calf starter concentrates to assure vitamin E levels in blood post-weaning; Transition feed rations for rosé veal calves; Probiotics for unweaned and newly weaned calves; Improve colostrum feeding of calves
Bernadette Earley
Dr. Earley, is a Principal Research Scientist in animal health and welfare at the Animal and Bioscience Research Department, Animal & Grassland Research and Innovation Centre (AGRIC), Teagasc, Co. Meath, Ireland. Her research experience is in bovine immunology, animal health and welfare, and animal behaviour. She collaborates extensively with national and international personnel and institutions. Dr. Earley has developed, characterised and published research findings on five animal husbandry management practices; weaning, transport, housing, disbudding and castration. Her research has informed policy at National, EU and OIE level.
Nathalie Bareille
After qualifying as a veterinarian, Nathalie Bareille chose to be a teacher at the National School of Veterinarians in Nantes (Oniris) in 1991. Currently, she teaches classes on herd management and population medicine applied to various cattle production systems. She is an epidemiologist working in production diseases in cattle herds in various farming systems. The main research projects which she is involved with aim to describe disease prevalence (and welfare impairments), assess the preventive effects of control actions, quantify the effects of the disease on animal performance and understand the role of advisors in health management strategies. She has supervised 14 doctoral students and has published 70 peer-reviewed international articles. She is the deputy director of the Oniris-INRAE BIOEPAR research unit, biology, epidemiology and animal health risk analysis (https://www6.angers-nantes.inrae.fr/bioepar_eng/Organisation-of-the-unit/Directory / Unit -members-files / Bareille-Nathalie).
Sonia Martí
Dr. Sonia Marti is a Research Scientist in the Department of Ruminant Production at Institut de Recerca i Tenologia Agroalimentaries de Catalunya, Spain. After completing the BAgrE, MSc and PhD in animal production (2012), Sonia completed an NSERC Postdoctoral fellowship at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Lethbridge (2013-2016) and the University of Calgary, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (2016-2018) conducting studies on painful procedures, the evaluation of chronic stress, as well as beef cattle lameness and transportation. Dr. Marti’s current research focuses on evaluating management practices of unweaned dairy calves reared for meat with a focus on health, productivity, welfare, and pre-slaughter factors to improve welfare and meat quality
Heather Neave
Heather Neave received her PhD in 2019 at the University of British Columbia in Canada where she examined how personality traits of dairy calves affect feeding behavior and performance of dairy calves around weaning, using automated feeders. During her post-doc with AgResearch and DairyNZ in New Zealand, she used wearable technologies to understand how farm practices and individual cow characteristics affect daily behavior patterns on commercial grazing dairy farms. She co-authored a recent review critically reviewing the available technologies for use in dairy calves, and believes these technologies are a great opportunity to individualize management of dairy herds. Her talk will give an overview of recent work using technologies for strategic weaning and disease detection in dairy calves. Heather’s additional research projects aimed at improving dairy cattle welfare have included: assessment of emotional states; milk feeding and weaning programs for calves; sickness behaviour of transition cows; and provision of environmental enrichment. Heather is currently a post-doc at Aarhus University, Denmark where she is examining emotional and physiological states of cows, and weaning strategies for calves, managed in cow-calf contact systems.
Thomas Förster
Thomas Förster studied engineering and runs since 2004 together with his brother the company Förster-Technik GmbH. The company invented automatic calf feeders with sales around the world. Today the advantages of automatic calf feeding equipment are labor saving, better utilization of the genetic potential through higher levels of feed supply and data collection of each animal. Various additional devices and sensors can provide a complete picture about the calf development and all data is aggregated in the calf-cloud.
Jason Nickell
Dr. Jason Nickell received the DVM degree in 2003 from the University of Missouri. After four years of mixed animal practice, Dr. Nickell attained a PhD in Epidemiology at Kansas State University in 2010. Dr. Nickell serves as Manager of Professional Services for Allflex Livestock Intelligence. Dr. Nickell is a Diplomate of the ACVPM and member of the MVMA, AVMA, AVC, and AABP.
Eran Friedman
Dr. Eran Friedman received the DVM degree in 2012 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Attained a B.Sc. in animal sciences in 2008 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Before university gained experience working on the family dairy farm and in one of the biggest cow-calf operations in Israel. During university, worked as a research manager for the Animal Science department, exploring methods to mitigate the deleterious effects of heat stress on bovine fertility. After graduation worked as a bovine practitioner for 7 years before joining MSD Animal Health Intelligence as a researcher.
