Dairy cows have to become pregnant regularly to keep milk flowing and farms profitable, but finding out whether a cow is pregnant usually means specialised equipment, a trained technician or a laboratory test. Researchers at Cornell University are building a handheld alternative called the ReproPhone that gives the answer on the farm within minutes.

The work comes from the laboratory of David Erickson, professor of mechanical engineering, through the Cornell Agricultural Systems Testbed and Demonstration Site (CAST). The system is a portable mini-computer and a cartridge holding a test strip: the farmer puts a small blood sample on the strip and the device analyses it. It looks for Pregnancy Specific Protein B (PSPB), a marker of pregnancy, and instead of asking a person to read lines on a strip it measures a fluorescence signal to decide whether PSPB is present and at what concentration.

"Instead of a human having to decide if the test shows one line or two in the test strip, as in an over-the-counter COVID test, the ReproPhone measures fluorescence to decide if PSPB is present and at what level. If it is above a certain level, then the cow is pregnant," said Julio Giordano, professor of dairy cattle biology and reproduction and director of CAST. "There's no human subjectivity involved. A farmer could do this test on-farm, on their own, without expensive equipment."

An advanced version under development measures two indicators at once, adding progesterone to show the cow's ovarian activity. If a cow is not pregnant, knowing her ovarian status helps decide the next step — breeding schedules or treatments that encourage ovulation. "Dairy cattle reproductive efficiency is critical to ensure consistent milk production and maximize farm profitability," said Thea Nikolaou, a biomedical engineering doctoral student in Erickson's lab.

The team also wants to fold the test into farm record-keeping, linking animal identification, sampling, testing and herd-management software into a single workflow. Industry partner BioTRACKING LLC supplies the antibody technology used to detect pregnancy. Field testing is about to start at Cornell's Dairy Research and Education Center, which manages hundreds of cows and young stock, to see how the device fits into everyday dairy work.

Source: Farms.com