DairyTech Capitalizes on Data

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

The agriculture industry is continually finding ways to leverage data. But one challenge is we only get data on yield once per year. That’s a pretty slow feedback loop by most industries’ standards. The dairy industry is an exception within agriculture. Most dairy producers are getting yield data in the way of milking every eight hours. Jordan Lambert with dairy software company VAS says dairies have access to cow data multiple times per day.

Lambert… “Rumination and activity sensors - so like Fitbits for cows, like callers, it's counting things like how much she's moving. And also how many times she's regurgitating her cud, which is a measure of her comfort and how well she's going to grind up her food, which allows her to make more milk. The better she grinds that food the better the feed conversion is. So those rumination and activity sensors, they're spitting out data every several seconds. Like it's really rapid. And I think that's only gonna increase.”

All of this is creating a tight feedback loop in dairy which has prompted them to embrace data for efficiency.

Lambert… “The feedback loop and the dairy industry is very short between learning that an intervention that you've made has gone well or has gone poorly. It goes very quickly.”

Dairy is a model other crops can look to for how to leverage data for efficiency.