Giorgio Provolo

University of Milan | UNIMI · Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences - Production, Landscape, Agroenergy

Smart technologies such as sensors, data analytics, and automated systems could play a crucial role in enhancing the resilience of livestock housing to climate change. By providing precise and timely data, these technologies enable better resource management, early detection of stressors, and adaptive responses to environmental changes. However, a...

The ammonia (NH3) stripping process can recover nitrogen (N) from slurry and digestates as a mineral fertilizer, but it is currently expensive and difficult to manage at the farm level. Hence, a simple process is required. This study aimed to test a modular (based on farm N surplus) slow-release NH3 stripping process at a pilot plant scale. NH3 vol...

Due to increasing herd sizes and automation on dairy farms there is an important need for automated monitoring of cow production, health, and welfare. Despite much progress in automatic monitoring techniques, there is still a need to integrate data from multiple sources to create a comprehensive overview and accurate diagnosis of a cow's state. To...

Reducing ammonia emissions is one of the great environmental challenges of the agricultural sector and is by far the most important emitter of this air pollutant. This study analyses maize cultivation with an emerging organic fertilisation management technique, i.e., pre-seeding injection, followed by side-dressing fertigation, through a life cycle...

Emission quantification from the agricultural sector, and especially from livestock manure management, is relevant for assessing mitigation strategies and for inventory purposes. There are different direct techniques used to monitor emissions from quiescent surfaces. Common techniques include the closed static chamber and the open dynamic chamber....

Heat stress presents one of the most urgent challenges to modern dairy farming, having major detrimental impacts on cow welfare, health, and production. Understanding the effect of cow factors (reproductive status, parity, and lactation stage) on the physiological and behavioural response to hot weather conditions is essential for the accurate dete...

We demonstrated a 19-inches 6U-rack sensing system based on quartz-enhanced photoacoustic spectroscopy for simultaneous detection of methane, nitrous oxide, and ammonia in atmosphere. The system embeds two detection modules, each one equipped with a quantum cascade laser as light source and a spectrophone composed of a T-shaped quartz tuning fork c...

Ammonia (NH3) emissions deriving from the management of livestock manure have a significant environmental impact, and therefore it is important to reduce them. Among the available options, the process of NH3 stripping is promising to remove NH3 from manures and digestates recovering it as a mineral fertilizer (e.g., ammonium sulfate) that is more w...

Monitoring dairy cattle behavior can improve the detection of health and welfare issues for early interventions. Often commercial sensors do not provide researchers with sufficient raw and open data; therefore, the aim of this study was to develop an open and customizable system to classify cattle behaviors. A 3D accelerometer device and host-board...

Dairy cow behavior is affected by external and endogenous factors, including time of year, barn microclimate, time of day and housing. However, little is known about the combined effects of these factors. Data were collected on eight farms in Northern Italy during summer, winter and a temperate season. The temperature-humidity index (THI) was recor...

Animal welfare is a fundamental pillar for livestock farming, and it can be endangered by a series of aspects, among which is the presence of undesired microclimates. This condition can be monitored by measuring the temperature-humidity index (THI), an index able to inform about the emergence of heat-stressing conditions in the barns. The THI can b...

Fertigation can be a suitable technique for utilizing digestate, minimizing nitrogen losses, and contributing to circularity within a farming system. For this purpose, digestate usually is first processed with a screw-press separator. However, further filtration is required to remove particles that could clog the nozzles of drip or sprinkling irrig...

Ammonia is recognized as one of the major atmospheric pollutants affecting air and ecosystem quality. The application of N fertilizers is a major source of NH3 emissions. It is necessary to develop simple, accurate and low cost measurement techniques to obtain representative data for a wide range of regions and agricultural practices. This informat...

Fertigation offers a practicable solution for applying digestate according to crop requirements during the growing season. Digestate injection in irrigation water can enhance the nutrient use efficiency, but a proper solid–liquid separation system is required to avoid nozzle clogging of drippers or sprinklers. To develop knowledge about the perform...

Excessive nutrient loadings from drainage areas and resulting water quality degradation in rivers are the major environmental issues around the world. The water quality further deteriorates for the large seasonal variation of precipitation and water flow. Environmental decision makers have been exploring affordable and effective ways of securing en...

The adoption of best available technologies (BATs) by the livestock sector has a fundamental role in developing a sustainable agricultural system. Italy is the EU member with the highest percentage of manure treated, but processing facilities are regionally scattered and the adoption of BATs is far from being scaled-up. The adoption is a matter of...

The aim of this study was to examine the time budgets of 20 lactating primiparous Italian Holstein cows and to determine the relationships between lying and standing behaviour, milk production and Body Condition Score in the first stage of lactation. Parturition period ranged from 15 September to 31 March and in the first seven lactation days all c...

Attention on animal behavior and welfare has been increasing. Scientific knowledge about the effect of behavior and welfare on animals' production augmented and made clear the need of improving their living conditions. Among the variables to monitor in dairy cattle farming, lying time represents a signal for health and welfare status as well as for...

Digestate is a nutrient-rich fertilizer and appropriate techniques are required for its application during the maize season to reduce losses and increase the nitrogen use efficiency (NUE). The performance of two different fertigation techniques (drip irrigation and pivot) were assessed using the digestate liquid fraction. A two-year field test was...

For on-farm welfare assessment many automatic methods have been developed to detect indicators of reduced welfare. However, there is still a need to integrate data from single sources to obtain a complete picture of the welfare of an animal. This review o�ers a basis for developing integrated automatic systems to assess dairy cow welfare by providi...

Protocols for manual weighing of turkeys are not practical on turkey farms because of the large body sizes, heavy weights and flighty nature of turkeys. The sounds turkeys make may be a proxy for bird weights, but the relationship between turkey sounds and bird weights has not been studied. The aim of this study was to correlate peak frequency (PF)...

The aim of this 5-year study was to evaluate the technical, economic, and environmental performances of a collective-based integrated treatment system for bioenergy production and nutrients removal to improve the utilization efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of land applied livestock manure. The study involved 12 livestock production u...

Among the most straining trends that farmers have to face there are: on one side, to guarantee welfare and adequate life conditions for animals and to reduce the environmental footprint, on the other side, to develop new strategies to improve farm management reducing costs. The current conditions and the expected developments of the dairy sector hi...

The objective of this study was to determine the effect of feed delivery frequency on the behavior patterns and on milk production of lactating dairy cows. The study was conducted on a commercial dairy farm. Feeding treatments of mixed ration consisted of two different frequencies replicated in two periods. Cows were fed 9 times per day (9×) and 6...

The reduction of ammonia (NH3) emissions associated with manure management requires identification and implementation of effective techniques. The objective of this study was to measure potential ammonia emissions from animal manure and evaluate emission reductions for five mitigation techniques (straw, sawdust, clay, oil and sulphuric acid). Altho...

Management systems in modern dairy farms is an important issue in relation to animal comfort and welfare. The objective of this study was to determine the effect of feed delivery frequency on the behavior patterns, visits to an automatic milking system (AMS) and on milk production of lactating dairy cows. The study was conducted on a commercial dai...

To increase the sustainable reuse of animal manure as fertiliser, in many cases suitable treatment techniques are needed to modify the composition and obtain a balanced nutrient content. This study was conducted to evaluate the best strategies to remove solids, P, Cu and Zn, using two additives Ca(OH) 2 and Al 2 (SO 4 ) 3 , in combination with an a...

Land disputes are considered both key sources and perpetuating factors of conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Existing literature demonstrates that remote sensing (RS) is a useful tool for systematically monitor the spatial-temporal land use/land cover dynamics in many regions of the world. For this reason, in this paper...

Collective manure processing facilities to reduce nutrient loads and produce renewable energy are often proposed as feasible solutions in intensive livestock production areas. However, the transferring of effluents from farms to the treatment plant and back to farms, as well as the treatment operations themselves, must be carefully evaluated to ass...

Cattle and pig manure contain useful mineral nutrients (N, P, and K) and are therefore used as organic fertilizer. However, excessive applications of manure can cause environmental problems and threaten animal and human health because these materials also hold significant amounts of heavy metals, particularly Cu and Zn. To assess the potential risk...

This study assessed a novel technique for removing nitrogen from digested organic waste based on a slow release of ammonia that was promoted by continuous mixing of the digestate and delivering a continuous air stream across the surface of the liquid. Three 10-day experiments were conducted using two 50-L reactors. In the first two, nitrogen remova...

This study aimed to examine the influence of feed delivery frequency and environmental conditions on daily time budget of lactating dairy cows. The study was carried out in two commercial dairy farms with Holstein herds. Fifty lactating dairy cows milked in automatic milking units (AMS farm) and 96 primiparous lactating dairy cows milked in a conve...

Management factors affect nutrient loss during animal manure slurry storage in different ways. We conducted a pilot‐scale study to evaluate carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) losses from unseparated and digested dairy slurry during winter and summer storage. In addition to season, treatments included mechanical separation of digestate into liquid and soli...

In this study, eight different manure treatment plants were monitored. The plants were four on-farm and four centralized treatment plants, all of them at full-scale level. Assess­ment includes a total of seven pre-treatment and process units as follows: mechanical separa­tion, with and without coagulant and flocculant addition, pasteurization, nitr...

Storage of livestock slurries is a significant source of methane (CH 4 ) and ammonia (NH 3 ) emissions to the atmosphere, for which accurate quantification and potential mitigation methods are required. Methane and NH 3 emissions were measured from pilot‐scale cattle slurry (CS) and pig slurry (PS) stores under cool, temperate, and warm conditions...

Although significant improvements in water quality have been achieved in Europe over the last two decades, water quality status is still below desirable levels in many locations. As in many other regions around the world, nonpoint source pollution from agricultural landscapes remains the key cause of water quality problems in many parts of Europe d...

Additives applied to animal manure slurries can affect the chemical composition and the biological processes of slurries during storage, with possible improvement of their management and reduction of environmental problems. Some new formulations are marketed claiming a nitrogen (N) removal effect due to denitrification, with the consequence of a re...

Among environmental issues related to intensive livestock activity, emissions to air from manure management are of increasing concern. Thus the knowledge of the effect of treatment application on subsequent emissions from manure is required to assess the environment impact of management solutions. This work addresses the effect of anaerobic digesti...

The objective of this report is to identify the most promising measures at the regional and farm levels, in particular in saturated areas, to improve the use of nutrients and to reduce their negative impacts. These include increasing resource efficiency at the farm level, using processing techniques and transferring manure from saturated areas to n...

Monitoring cow behaviour has become increasingly important in understanding the nutrition, production, management of the well being, and overall health of dairy cows. Methods of assessing behavioural activity have changed in recent years, favouring automatic recording techniques. Traditional methods to measure behaviour, such as direct observation...

Manure management causes massive nutrient losses to the environment. Acidification can reduce ammonia emissions and solid–liquid separation improves organic nutrient distribution on fields. Because acidification changes slurry composition, it impacts on the subsequent operation of solid–liquid separators and products. The aim was to determine the e...

Emissions of ammonia and greenhouse gases from animal manure are an environmental concern and new techniques should be carefully examined to establish their effect on emissions across the whole management continuum, including storage operations. Biogas plants are becoming more common at farm facilities and the management of digestate raises some co...

Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) was used to analyse livestock slurries and digestates. The purpose was to evaluate the influence of sample preparation, reading set-up and sample temperature during NIR scanning on digestates and livestock slurry samples. To obtain accurate and reproducible values of total solids (TS), total kjeldahl nitrogen (TKN)...

This article presents a fuzzy logic management support system that facilitates management of farm-based biogas plants. The considered input variables (feeding rate, organic loading rate, anaerobic biogasification potential, biogas production, and the percentage of methane in the biogas) are simple and typically available for full-scale plants. Outp...

Behavioral monitoring may be useful to assess the welfare, state of health and comfort of farm animals. Lying behavior is often used as an indication of well-being in cattle and for evaluating the stall quality. The use of electronic data loggers to automate behavioral recording has become increasingly common. We tested the use of the Pedometer Plu...

Research on feeding management in more competitive free-stall settings indicates that frequency of delivery of fresh feed stimulates feed bunk attendance and can affect other aspects of cows’ time budgets apart from feeding such as time spent standing vs. lying down. The objective of this study was to examine how the frequency of feed delivery affe...

Hydrogen is considered one of the possible main energy carriers for the future, thanks to its unique environmental properties. Indeed, its energy content (120 MJ/kg) can be exploited virtually without emitting any exhaust in the atmosphere except for water. Renewable production of hydrogen can be obtained through common biological processes on whic...

In intensive livestock area with large nutrient surplus collective management systems can be a suitable solution. However, the collective system should carefully evaluated for environmental sustainability to avoid cross effects. The aim of this study was to evaluate the environmental effects of the introduction of a collective treatment plant for e...

The objectives of this study were to determine the following: 1) evaluate the validity of automated monitoring systems as assessment method for the behavioral activity of dairy cows compared to video recording, and 2) the sampling intervals required to obtain reliable estimates of the daily behavior. To determine lying, standing, and walking, 12 co...

Research on feeding management in more competitive free-stall settings indicates that frequency of delivery of fresh feed stimulates feed bunk attendance and can affect other aspects of cows' time budgets apart from feeding such as time spent standing vs. lying down. The objective of this study was to examine how the frequency of feed delivery affe...

Hydrogen is considered one of the possible main energy carriers for the future, thanks to its unique environmental properties. Indeed, its energy content (120 MJ/kg) can be exploited virtually without emitting any exhaust in the atmosphere except for water. Renewable production of hydrogen can be obtained through common biological processes on whic...

the objective of the current study was to determine the number of focal animals required to represent the daily lying behaviour of a herd of lactating dairy cows. the study was carried out at 3 commercial dairy farms. the lying time (h/d) and number of lying bouts (n/d) of 15 ± 3 focal dairy cows, continuously recorded by electronic recording devic...

The procedure for applying phosphorus (P) fertilizer to soil can be divided into three consecutive steps: (i) Measurement of soil-P availability, (ii) calibration of the soil-P fertility level and (iii) estimation of the recommended P dose. Information on each of these steps was obtained for 18 European countries and regions with the aim of compari...

Solid-liquid separation is a widely used manure treatment option. However, little information is available to predict separator perform-ance in a specific operating condition. This study investigates the effect on the separation efficiency of animal species (cattle and swine), use of flocculants, and separator construction and operating characteris...

The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of feeding frequency on milk produc-tion, dry matter intake (DMI) and cow behav-iour on two dairy farms with conventional and automatic milking systems (AMS) in differ-ent environmental conditions. Cows on two farms were monitored. On the first farm, 96 primiparous cows were milked in a herring-bon...

Dairy farm buildings can have, as it is well known, a big influence on the microclimatic conditions in the cowshed. In order to examine the influence of environmental parameters on the conditions affecting animal welfare, an experimental programme was set up at a farm where anomalous behaviour of cows had been previously noted. The research was car...

Behavioural activity is used as an indication of animal comfort, and lying and standing behaviours are often used as a sign of well-being in cattle and to evaluate the quality of stalls. The aim of this study was to compare the values of different behavioural indices at different scan-sampling frequencies and to evaluate the different methods of da...

Behaviour is one of the most commonly used and sensitive indicators of animal welfare. Methods of assessing behavioural activity have changed in recent years, favouring techniques that automate monitoring and recording of animal behaviour, respect to use video recording system. The objectives of the current study were to determine the capability of...

The composition of cattle slurries can vary greatly due to factors such as farm management, meteorology, animal diet and housing system. Thus, when spread on land, the precise fertiliser value is usually unknown. In this study, 41 samples of cattle slurry from farms in Co. Wexford, were analysed for electrical conductivity (EC), pH, and for concent...

Considerable quantities of dirty water, composed of milking parlour wash-water, milk spillages, runoff from cattle yard areas and, possibly, effluent from silage and manure, are produced on dairy farms. In Ireland, dirty water from dairy farm facilities is normally managed by spreading on, or irrigation to, land. It has considerable potential to ca...

Climatic changes and energy cost are the main factors contributing to the latest, strong efforts made by manufacturers and growers in obtaining energy demand reductions in greenhouse cultivations. Also in Mediterranean conditions, the lower amount of energy needed to control the greenhouse environment – i.e. compared to Northern Europe requirements...

Energy consumption for heating greenhouses plays a key role on the profitability of protected productions. Therefore, much effort should be focused to increase the heating efficiency in floriculture as it is strongly related to quality and timeliness aspects. Besides, considering the global energy crisis and the environmental impasse, the improveme...