Fuzzy Logic Membership Values as a Ranking Tool for Breeding Purposes in Dairy Cattle

There are many on-farm instances where a farmer needs to rank animals for purposes of breeding decisions (e.g., culling, mating, replacement). In these cases, the method of ranking may vary from being quite objective (e.g., use of official breeding values or simple production figures) to a more subjective manner in which the farmer makes the decision based on his own perception of an animal’s merit. While this latter method is not necessarily less valid, there is the possibility of it being used in an inconsistent fashion, and it is liable to change over time. Since there is no denying the fact that many competent managers are making sound on-farm decisions on a daily basis, many expert systems have been proposed or developed on the principle of encoding these experts’ knowledge in an executable code. The groundwork for this research started similarly – the creation of a fuzzy logic expert system that was required to return a crisp answer as to whether or not an individual cow should be culled from a herd.[...