In the 35th national final of the competition, Anna Oberauer and Julia Staple made it into the top five Austrian projects in the “Science” category and were awarded a prize from the Federal Ministry for Digitalization and Economic Location, the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research as well as the Federal Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology and the Austria Wirtschaftsservice GmbH (aws). They also received the digitization bonus for projects with a current focus on digitization. The aim was to develop a conceptual future scenario for your own project that focused on the development of digitalization. The prizes were awarded at a celebratory awards show in the Aula der Wissenschaften in Vienna.

The award-winning project dealt with the FarmLife Welfare Index HBLFA Raumberg-Gumpenstein . This assesses the animal welfare potential on dairy farms in the three sub-areas “ keeping conditions ”, “ animal care and management ” and “ animals ”. The evaluation of 18 indicator groups consisting of 43 individual indicators is included in these three sub-areas. The assessment takes place online via the joint homepage www.farmlife.at. With a high degree of practicality in use, this assessment system focuses on the animal, but at the same time the assessment result should also allow conclusions to be drawn about the influencing factors and provide the farmer with recommendations for improving any husbandry or management deficiencies .

This success shows the great social importance of the two core topics of “animal welfare” and “digitalization” at the HBLFA Raumberg-Gumpenstein and underlines the valuable collaboration between research and teaching.

The Direktion would like to congratulate and thank the honorees and everyone who contributed to this excellent achievement.

More information about the competition here .