At present, there are more than 40 national standards for cattle breeding, but there is no technical standard for cattle shed lighting, and cattle shed lighting is an important fulcrum for facility breeding. Research on cattle shed lighting at home and abroad still lacks standardization, and the LED era has also ushered in In the era of spectroscopic technology in biooptics, standards for lighting technology in cattle sheds are needed.
Intensification of poultry and livestock breeding has developed rapidly, and almost all applicable breeding technologies have reached a level close to the top level of technology. Only breeding lighting technology still has huge room for improvement. The introduction of standards can develop technology faster, because Standards are technical boundaries that can constrain the cost of trial and error.
1. Technical mechanism of lighting in cattle sheds
First, we need to understand the visual mechanism of cattle. From the perspective of visual response, cattle are dual-vision animals.
Many people will question how people can derive the vision of a bull’s eye with only two peaks. Regarding this issue, the standard has a description. What needs to be emphasized here is that the distribution of animal vision’s response to photons is based on the distribution of rod cells and cones. inferred.
The visual structure of cattle: Cows have a good viewing angle, with a field of view of 300°, which helps them feel possible threats at any time. The eyes are located on both sides of the head, which makes the frontal visual depth perception of the eyes low. The cow’s double vision reduces the resolution of some objects; in addition to gray and black, the cow sees yellow and blue that are not distinct.
Cattle have no preference for the amount of light, but they often show a preference for familiar lighting in test environments; cattle like to be in a darker environment when they are awake, and cattle like to rest in dark light. Excessively high light levels in the barn will not make cattle feel disgusted. From the perspective of energy conservation, strong light should be avoided.
There are two types of cones in the bovine eye, with average maximum sensitivities at 439 nm and 556 nm respectively. The cow’s eye has dichromatic vision; but it is not sensitive to color. In the 495-525 nm wavelength range between the two response peaks, the cow’s visual sensitivity has a low point. The cow’s eye is located on both sides, resulting in the cow’s eye’s depth of field discrimination of objects. Low, the cow needs more time to process visual information.
The main function of cattle vision is to find food.
Cows are colorblind in red and green, but that doesn’t mean they can’t perceive green and red light at all, just less; cows perceive these two colors similarly to seeing black or gray. shades, not these colors. The cow’s eye responds brightly to orange light, and cows can also distinguish almost any color on a gray background. Cows see blue and yellow differently than humans do. Cows see these two colors as faded colors. This is because cows only have blue and orange receptors and are color blind to green. Therefore, cows cannot see all of these colors. Shadows are very different from human vision.
The left is the human eye, the right is the bull’s eye
For the same scene, what the human eye sees is different from what the cow’s eyes see. Cows have poor depth perception of objects; they cannot distinguish the distance between objects very well. When the light shines on the ground or in front of it, the illumination is uneven. When the temperature is high, cattle may stop to identify. Therefore, the lighting design needs to ensure that there is no obvious alternation of light and dark on the ground. The uniformity of lighting in the cowshed is a very important lighting indicator.
Illustration of the scene the cow sees (corrected for color and clarity)
Unlike the round pupils of the human eye, cow pupils are horizontal, but cows can see better in the dark than humans because their eyes have a light-reflecting surface inside called the tapetum. This surface is an area located at the back of the eyeball, below the retina, corresponding to the height of the choroid; this area causes light entering the eyeball to reflect within the eye, thereby amplifying low light and helping them see their food in dark environments.
Cows’ eyes cannot distinguish grass and leaves that are green to human eyes. However, cows have a well-developed sense of smell and can distinguish the freshness of forage. Cows are so sensitive to smells that they can detect them up to 8 kilometers away. Odor; this means that lighting products need to have certain odor requirements for materials. In addition, cattle can hear higher and lower frequencies better than humans. Strict requirements are required for the electrical noise of lighting products. This standard adopts (dB ) to regulate.
The purpose of the cattle shed lighting technical specifications is to improve the comfort of the cattle’s living environment, reduce the pressure on the cattle, enable them to improve their ability to recognize food and groups, eat and rest better, and minimize light energy consumption and feed expenses. ; Achieve animal welfare and healthy breeding, and be able to provide high-quality meat and milk quality.
2. Standard application and effects
The standard can be downloaded from this public account. The formulation of this standard clearly solves the technical problems of cattle lamp application. The technical understanding of the standard is not difficult. As long as you read it carefully, you can avoid application misunderstandings. I will not describe it further here.
The first hormone affected by the photoperiod is melatonin, which is produced in the dark when photons act on the retina of a bull’s eye. Light inhibits an enzyme used in the synthesis of melatonin in the pineal gland. Therefore, as the amount of light or photoperiod increases, the duration of high levels of melatonin in the blood decreases; the concentration of melatonin in the blood can affect the concentration of certain hormones in the blood, such as insulin-like growth factor (IGF-1) . Scientists believe that changes in IGF-1 concentration play a role in the effect on milk production during the photoperiod, and IGF-1 has been shown to increase milk production.
Light quality can affect melatonin, thereby affecting and regulating the growth of cattle. Light is transmitted through the eyes of cattle, and is responded to by the neuroendocrine system composed of a series of hormones and receptors from the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and target organs. The process is complex, but it uses light quantum The theory can calculate the number of photons entering the bull’s eye, thereby providing quantitative indicators for qualitative analysis.
There is no corresponding relationship between the cow’s eye visual response and the lighting spectrum design. The biological control of cattle house lighting is an extremely complex technology. It requires (R-R-A) evaluation rules to obtain experimental data and conduct statistical analysis to prove the cattle house lighting spectrum technology. effectiveness.
After the application of cattle lamps, a series of data and input-output ratio data will be displayed in subsequent professional standards implementation lectures due to commercial information disclosure restrictions.
Formulating technical specifications for cattle shed lighting is not only a technical specification for cattle lighting, but also has guiding significance for forage planting. Currently, there are some misunderstandings in forage planting, which lead to the emergence of these misunderstandings because the implementers do not understand the inherent Technical logic, the application of this standard, not only regulates the manufacturing of cattle lamps, but also distinguishes which companies have the correct technical support capabilities through the physiological characteristics of cattle, corrects the market chaos in the industry for the purpose of vested interests, and avoids supply Cattle businesses bring risks.
Biooptics is the use of photon energy as the basic unit to study the response of organisms to light under light radiation. Scientific cattle lighting uses biooptics technology to establish the application of cattle lighting technology.