COVER STORY
Dairy farms today are increasingly using robots, artificial intelligence, data-driven techniques and other farm management software to increase efficiency and improve cow health.
DIGITAL DAIRY FARMING By Trudy Kelly Forsythe
CONTRIBUTOR
J
ack Rodenburg, a dairy management consultant with DairyLogix, has seen a lot of technological changes and improvements during his career. He says when robotics, specifically ....robotic milking, first came along, the industry was concerned farmers would have less ability to manage animal health without the personal contact and close observation one is able to get during milking. As a result, early developments built in a lot of checks and balances and sensor-driven information to compensate for that. “From the beginning, all robotic milking systems included information about milk conductivity and information about milk colour as a substitute for the farmer squeezing that first strip of milk out of the teat at the start of milking,” he says, adding robots today give substantially better data at every milking than earlier versions. In the past decade, a big shift has been the improved functionality of wearable technologies and in-line milking analysis systems, primarily because battery capacity has greatly improved. “We worked a fair bit with pedometers and devices that had to be read in the milking parlour and one of the reasons for that was because battery life was an issue,” Rodenburg says. “Because of developments in other industries, our batteries have gotten 10 times better in the last 10 years, so now pretty much all that technology has shifted to signaling receivers located throughout
Dairy farming has become increasingly digital since farmers installed the first robotic milkers in the late 1990s. These days, it’s not unusual to find dairy farmers using automatic feeders, artificial intelligence, data-driven techniques, farm management software and smartphones, to better manage their farms and improve cow health and welfare.
the barn so you can get a lot more real-time information.” One area this is quite helpful with is reproduction. Since cows in heat are more active, and tend to not voluntarily go to the milking robot, the activity pedometers provide data to farmers earlier than the robotic milker would. “The system knows that cow is in heat, but you don’t if you don’t get a readout until she goes into the milking system,” Rodenburg says. “In the robotic milking applications, the systems that can pick up data in real time throughout the barn have proven to be a substantial improvement.” The same sensor can flag when a cow may be sick, although Rodenburg says this technology is in its infancy and needs to be improved. “We have new technology coming out that will measure inner ear temperature or internal temperature with a bolus that’s in the rumen, but very few of them have been picked up by mainstream milking equipment companies at this point,” he says, adding he sees a bright future for when it does make its way into dairy barns. There is also potential in feed preparation and feed delivery, the second largest labour factor on a dairy farm after milking. The big challenge, however, is maintaining feed quality since feed is moved from storage into the system. “Most of the bigger dairies store their feed in bunker silos or piles and these robotic systems don’t really have the capability of removing that from the silo,” Rodenburg says. “When you do that, you loosen the material and then it gets exposed to air and you run the risk of spoilage from that point on.” People are taking different approaches to deal with this issue, and more adoption of automatic feeding systems is expected in the future. Rodenburg is hopeful the advances being made with automation and sensor-based technology will benefit smaller operations as well as larger ones. “When we were dealing with just mechanization technology, things like milking parlours and total mixed ration mixers, everything was always about bigger because bigger is what made those investments financially feasible,” he says. “I think this makes it possible for a family-run dairy to be much more sustainable and economically viable than the earlier technologies did.”
