The management of dairy farms requires a multidisciplinary competence that integrates animal science background and skills that belong to economic or engineering domains. The standards of sustainability and technical-economic efficiency required of companies to achieve adequate levels of profitability are increasingly high. Dairy farm management have high responsibilities to reduce environmental impact of dairy production systems. High opportunities for dairy management has been emerging especially if farm data are used to predict animal requirements and farm performances over time in order to support farmer decisions. The research topic will focus on the use of farm available data (nutrition, milking , dynamics and reproduction softwares, meteo, etc) to study the main areas of farm management espcially focusing on feed efficiency and economic efficiency. The main output of the research will advance dairy farm models to increase the awareness of farmers and improve farm management in terms of sustainable and resilient productions.The Ph.D. Is designed to foster multidisciplinary interaction of biological and livestock expertise, physics for thermoregulation modeling and data analysis, economics, and mechanical and management engineering for optimization of farm production processes and climate change adaptation impact assessment.

Aptitude to model and work with spreadsheet and data management, background in animal science ruminant preferred, aptitude to work with economics and management.

The research team will involve one associate professor of animal nutrition and management, two postdoc specialized in modeling, 2 PhD in animal science, collaboration with economists and engineers