Establish grazing practices would improve the welfare of the animals, allowing them to express more natural behaviours. However, free-range reduces the ability to monitor the animals, thus increase the time needed to intervene in the event of a health problem. To ease the adoption of grazing, farmer would benefit from autonomously collected indicators at pasture that identify abnormal behaviours possibly related to a health problem in a bovine. These indicators must be individualised and collected in the uncontrolled pasture environment. As an attractive place visited at regular pace, the path to the watering trough offers a proper location to collect data needed to establish health and behavior indicators.  We therefore investigate the possibility to use watering behaviour as a monitoring tool at pasture level in temperate climate for which little data is available to the best of our knowledge. This study allows us to establish a baseline of the drinking behaviour of cattle under the conditions of the experiment and whether interesting information for herd management can be derived.

For this purpose we developed a monitoring gantry with stationary sensors to perform animal based measurements. This device is equipped along with other sensors with a RFID reader that allows the detection of the time of passage and identification of the ear-tag equipped animals. This gantry was placed at the only one way access of the waterhole. The experimentation was performed during summer 2021 from June 16th to October 18th, for a total of 93 days of data collection. An average of 8.9 cattle was present on this pasture, with 16 different individuals during the measurements season placed according to forage availability. The experiment took place in the Belgian temperate oceanic climate. In the pasture of 9300 m², the maximum distance from the water point was 164 meters to exclude any influence of distance to the watering hole on drinking behaviour and to focus on other influencing factors.

This experiment allows us to observe the diurnal behaviour of cattle, when most of the drinking is taking. The drinking are generally grouped into 3 periods. On average each animal passed by 1.36 times per day when present on the pasture. We were able to detect social behaviour in these animals, which presented themselves grouped on average at 4.95 individuals within 10 minutes of each other at the trough. This kind of observation can highlight the isolation of an animal from the herd. Since we have the temporal follow-up of the passages, it is also possible to relate it to the contrasted climatic conditions that occurred during the campaign and the number of passages.

These observations therefore allow us to determine the classical watering pattern of our cattle when placed on pasture. A significant change in the habits of an animal can therefore be detected and be used to suggest the intervention of the farmer in order to focus the surveillance on the targeted animal.