Near-infrared spectroscopic sensing system for online monitoring of milk quality during milking

Abstract

There has been a need in recent years for a method that will enable dairy farmers to monitor milk quality of individual cow during milking. We constructed a near-infrared (NIR) spectroscopic sensing system for online monitoring of milk quality on an experimental basis. This system enables NIR spectra of unhomogenized milk to be obtained during milking over a wavelength range of 600-1050 nm. We developed calibration models for predicting three major milk constituents (fat, protein and lactose), somatic cell count (SCC) and milk urea nitrogen (MUN) of unhomogenized milk, and we validated the precision and accuracy of the models. The coefficient of determination (r 2 ) and standard error of prediction (SEP) of the validation set were obtained: for fat, r 2 = 0.95, SEP = 0.42%; for protein, r 2 = 0.91, SEP = 0.09%; for lactose, r 2 = 0.94, SEP = 0.05%; for SCC, r 2 = 0.82, SEP = 0.27 log SCC/mL; and for MUN, r 2 = 0.90, SEP = 1.33 mg/dL, respectively. These results indicated that the NIR spectroscopic sensing system developed in this study could be used to monitor milk quality in real-time during milking. The system can provide dairy farmers with information on milk quality and physiological condition of each cow and therefore give them feedback control for producing milk of high quality and for optimizing dairy farm management.

Milk and Dairy Products

“…The implementation of an online IR sensing system which would allow determination of milk composition of individual cows during milking at farm level would assist in the management of dairy herds. In recent years a number of studies have examined the potential of NIR spectroscopy in such an application ( Tsenkova et al , 1999( Tsenkova et al , , 2000Woo et al , 2002 ;Kawamura et al , 2007 ). If NIR spectroscopy is to be employed for online determination of milk composition during milking then the technique must be suitable for determining the composition of unhomogenized milk.…”

“…Recently Kawamura et al (2007) constructed a sensing system which consisted of an NIR instrument, a milk fl ow meter and a milk sampler, to monitor milk quality during milking. They installed the system between the teatcup cluster and the milk bucket of the milking machine, which allowed a continuous fl ow of milk by the NIR sensor during milking.…”

Prediction of colloidal stability in white wines using infrared spectroscopy

“…Interestingly, there do not appear to be any previous investigations into the application of NIR for the determination of either protein or polysaccharides in white wines although it has been widely applied to other commodities. Previous studies have used NIR for the estimation of protein content in flour (Osborne and Fearn, 1983), milk (Kawamura et al, 2007) and in model solutions of lysozyme (Hu et al, 2000) and albumin (Murayama et al, 1998). Related NIR methods for polysaccharides include those by Benelli et al (2005), Robert and Cadet (1998) and Polesello et al (1990).…”

Sprouting detection at early stages in individual CWAD and CWRS wheat kernels using SWIR spectroscopy

“…This approach has been used in food safety and inspection [11,12], for fruit maturity determination [13] and for a-amylase measurement in wheat [14] as well as for other agricultural products [15][16][17][18]. These reports use three different hyperspectral waveband approaches.…”