Irish dairy farmer mining Bitcoin with 'green energy' from digester
Plus, herd management software companies announce new features and partnerships
Mining Bitcoin is an energy-intensive process, but one Irish dairy farmer is using renewable energy from his digester to power computers solving complex mathematical equations and earning Bitcoin for doing so. His digesters produce 500 KW to 700 KW of energy. What energy he doesn’t use on farm, he sells back to the grid as “green energy.” However, as U.S. farmers are well aware, you don’t often get paid a premium on every kilowatt of “green energy” you sell back to the grid.
Alternatively, he partnered with an Irish startup to create his own marketplace where he can sell his “green energy” to Bitcoin miners. He now claims he’s a dairy farmer turning grass into Bitcoin. For every 2.5 months his digester is running, he’s earning one bitcoin – worth nearly $28,000 (as of the end of March 2023).
Watch farmer Tom Campbell’s story below:
Learn more about the company partnering with Tom’s farm.
New software feature makes digging into herd health costs easier
Dairy herd management software giant VAS recently announced a new insight tool available to all of its cloud-based users – HealthVAL. The new insight tool analyzes a dairy’s health events and trends for cows and heifers.
The new feature tracks the cost and occurrence of key health events, including mastitis, pneumonia, lameness, metritis, retained placenta, ketosis, milk fever and displaced abomasum. Farmers can customize the health events they want to track and set a threshold for each and the total cost per event. A suggested cost is preloaded based on industry standards from the Journal of Dairy Science.
“The index makes it easier to identify the animals costing a farm more,” says Preston Vincent, VP of sales at VAS. “You can quickly assess problem animals, what type of health events have contributed to their accumulated cost and when those costs were incurred.”
Herd managers can also set up an unlimited number of text or email alerts for when data exceeds health event thresholds. These can be sent to farm employees or key off-the-farm consultants.
Benchmarking herd health performance against other herds is also available. A farm manager can customize the herd size, region and breed to which it wants to compare their farm against others.
The company also recently announced another feature – OneView – that can aggregate data from an owner’s multiple dairy sites into a just one companywide dashboard.
Up-and-coming dairy management platform integrates with top U.S. dairy co-op
BoviSync, a disrupter in the dairy management software space, recently announced a partnership that will allow it to integrate data from Dairy One Cooperative and Dairy Farmers of America (DFA). The cloud-based dairy management platform says the integration will allow more dairies to effectively manage their herds by streamlining and simplifying daily tasks.
“We are looking forward to the opportunity to work with Dairy One Cooperative,” says Dr. David Cook, founder of BoviSync. “Our focus is simplifying the most difficult herd management tasks, so important decisions can be easier to make. Incorporating the information Dairy One collects on a daily basis will help bring added value to Dairy One customers.”
Promising probiotic for fresh cows nears commercial market clearance
Canadian researchers behind a soon-to-be-available commercial product for fresh cows say their product is close to commercial launch. The product is a intra-vaginal probiotic supplement. Researchers behind the development of the product say it will help fresh cows avoid common health challenges.
The scientists isolated three native strains of lactic acid bacteria found in the reproductive tract of healthy cows and have been testing them as a probiotic “vaginal drench.” Their research showed administering the probiotic to recently calved cows led to a 50 percent reduction in post-calving uterine infections and lowered the rate of milk fever incidence by half. The product will be marketed by Healthy Cow Corporation.
Read more about how their beneficial bacteria are helping fresh cows.
Did you know? Nearly 20 percent of farms in Canada are milking cows with robots.
Global manufacturer launches new feeding robot
Robot manufacturer DeLaval recently announced a new feed distribution robot will join its autonomous feeding system. The new robot – named the OptiWagon – is capable of feeding various cow groups with a different feed mix up to 12 times per day. The robot comes in two versions – one that can feed up to 130 cows and one that can feed up to 1,000 cows.
Read more here.
Developers behind an activity monitoring system for calves explain how their system works
British researchers based in Cambridge recently opened up about how their system – known as Smartbell – tracks the activity of dairy animals and how barn environment affects animal health. The startup’s real-time animal tracking and environmental monitoring tech is at the heart of a unique research project into how barn design affects cow welfare.
Read more here.
Dairy profit projections from ZISK
Projected profitability for the next 12-month for two dairy herd sizes HAVE INCREASED in recent profit projections from ZISK.
ZISK is a profit-projection smartphone app that tracks individual dairy farm profitability based on current CME board prices. Projections for a 1,000-cow dairy producing an average of 80 pounds of milk per cow and a 2,500-cow dairy producing an average of 85 pounds of milk per cow are provided.
12-month dairy farm profit projections (as of March 30, 2023):
1,000-cow dairy = $337,300 (UP about $14,600 since the middle of March)
2,500-cow dairy = $1.603 million (UP about $39,000 since the middle of March)