PrecisionDairy Technology

Familiar with precision agriculture. You may not know this method is also being adopted by more dairy operations in the US, per a recent USDA study. David Sparks, Idaho AG today with USDA research economist Jonathan McFadden. Speaker2: One thing we did in the report was look at farmers adoption of combinations of technologies. And so something that we talk a lot about in precision agriculture for field crops is how farmers typically don't use one tool or technology in isolation, but usually they use them in combinations. And some of that's because the technologies come automatically bundled, or there are just other economic incentives whereby the farmer would want to sort of use them in combination. And so one thing we did was look at farmers bundled use here. So by and large, we found that many farmers are using breeding technologies plus some other type of group of technologies. So for example, 18% of US dairy farms in 2021 were using a combination of breeding technologies as well as individual cow production records, milking units with automatic takeoffs, and nutritionist designed diets. Just below that. About 15% of US dairies were using a combination of breeding technologies, individual cow records and nutritionist designed diets. There are other types of combinations as well. Speaker1: Yet adoption of precision dairy tech and robotic milking vary based on factors such as the type of tech, geography, and herd size.