Muzzles may be the key to biometric cattle identification
***Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from The Cow Tech Report***
An Australian researcher is testing if cattle muzzles – like human fingerprints – could be used to tell one cow apart from another. He says his research so far shows each muzzle is unique to each individual cow. He’s developing technology that could identify cows visually based on their unique muzzles. So far he claims it is 99.11 percent accurate in a lab setting.
Read more here.
Activity monitoring system can now sync data via satellite
A U.S.-based activity monitoring company recently released a transmitter that downloads data from the company’s bluetooth activity monitoring collars to a satellite-enabled transmitter. Herddogg’s activity monitoring collars are bluetooth-enabled and can communicate with the transmitter to offload data and get it into the cloud via satellite connection. The new technology allows a rancher to track the location and health of cattle pastured in remote areas where cellular coverage is not available.
The company claims it is significantly less expensive and intrusive than GPS collar-based monitoring systems.
“StarDogg is perfect for ranchers with significant acreage and those who graze cattle on land leased from the Bureau of Land Management, where there is generally no terrestrial cellular coverage,” said Melissa Brandao, founder and chief revenue officer of Herddogg.
Learn more here.
Innovative dairyman talks cow tech on podcast
Dairyman Rodney Elliott of Drumgoon Dairy in South Dakota was the featured guest on World Dairy Expo’s The Dairy Show podcast earlier this month. He talked about his dairy’s recent expansion with 20 milking robots. He also discusses the other cutting-edge cow tech that he is currently testing on his own farm or that he is interested in trying in the future.
Listen to the podcast here.
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Idaho-based dealer fills the cow tech gap between OEMs and on-farm needs
Texas dairy emerges from ‘bleeding edge’ with new commercially viable manure treatment system
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Profit projections from ZISK
2022’s projected profitability for two dairy herd sizes INCREASED
since the beginning of the month in 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 Dec. 24, 2021):
1,000-cow dairy = $566,515 (UP
about $150,000 since the beginning of December)
2,500-cow dairy = $2.198 million (UP
about $365,000 since the beginning of December)