Using Facial Recognition Technology on Dairies

Using Facial Recognition Technology on Dairies

Last week while attending Alltech’s One conference in Lexington, KY I had the opportunity to visit with David Hunt, CEO and co-founder of Cainthus, who shares more about some exciting facial recognition technology that is benefiting dairy producers.
Hunt: “So what we are doing with cows is we are effectively putting CCTV systems into dairies. We have the patent for telling the difference from one cow and another simply by what they look like and how they move. That is what ultimately enables us to build analytics on top of that. So we don’t need ear tags or wearables to spot and follow an animal. We’re spotting and following them using video. Some of the things we can do — feed efficiencies analytics, early stage lameness identification, we can do general behavior analytics.”
Hunt continues with more on the behavior of cows, when humans aren’t around.
Hunt: “Cows behavior is completely different when we are not around than we are around. And one of the big behavioral changes is that they fight much more than we realize and they mostly do it when we are not around. What we have seen in our trial locations is — when a cow fight breaks out and it is normally over where the most nutrient dense place of the trough — how that affects the behavior of the rest of herd is massive. Basically any animal that is around the fight will stop eating and won’t go back feeding again for some time. So obviously you are getting loss in production and losing money simply because — unbeknownst to you — your cows are fighting quite a bit.”
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