‘Download it. Play it. Share it.’
Smartphone app gamifies training for cow-handling skills.
Nearly one year since being launched, the Mooving Cows educational game for Apple and Android devices has more than 14,000 downloads in 100 countries. The game was developed at the University of Wisconsin (UW) – Madison to teach proper cow-handling skills in an engaging way.
Jennifer Van Os, assistant professor of animal and dairy sciences at UW – Madison, and Jordan Matthews, a dairy farmer from Watertown, recently described how the app was developed. They participated in the 2024 Dairy Summit in Madison, Wisconsin.
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Rosy-Lane Holsteins, where Matthews is the herd manager, started working with Van Os in 2020 to build the app. The farm was an ideal partner for Van Os given its proactive approach to employee onboarding. Two-thirds of the farm’s employees are from outside the U.S. and speak some dialect of Spanish. Matthews says many of them have little to no experience working with cows when they start.
“We’re dealing with 2,000-pound animals,” Matthews says. “If there is a bad interaction, it can go south fast.”
Van Os highlights that cows are a prey species and certain behaviors when handling them can cause a fear response – a fight or flight reaction. She heard requests from farmers for animal-handling training on many of the farms she visited during her extension education efforts. Providing hands-on training was time-consuming. She wanted to find a way to multiply the number of farms that she could reach with training. That’s when the idea for a video game was born.