Robot dog for cattle operations to demo at World Ag Expo
Plus, off-grid AI camera predicts cattle disease two days before symptoms appear.
The Milc Group recently announced that they are now the exclusive agricultural distributor for Ghost Robotics. They will start distributing the company’s robot dogs in the dairy industry. The company sees value in the robot dogs for perimeter security, helping dairies monitor their property and improve safety without adding labor. The company also sees in the future how the robot dogs could be helpful for feed inventory checks, facility monitoring and identifying cow comfort or distress.
If you would like to get a look at a robot dog in person, Milc Group will have one in their booth at World Ag Expo. Their booth number is booth 6738 in the Farm Credit Dairy Center.
You can check out the robot dog in action in the video below.
World Ag Expo awards CowManager’s new product
A flashing light ear sensor from CowManager was named one of World Ag Expo’s Top 10 new products. The product called Find my Cow Flash launched at World Dairy Expo last fall.
The sensor makes it easy to identify the right cow, heifer or calf that needs attention in a pen. It enables producers to take immediate action following a health, fertility or location alert. The product claims to save producers valuable time, labor and operational costs, reduce stress on cows and employees, and minimize lockup times. Producers can activate the sensor light from their app or desktop in order to aid in finding cows quickly.
Off-grid AI camera predicts cattle disease two days before symptoms appear
MyAnIML has launched a solar-powered, edge-native artificial intelligence (AI) camera system that requires no Wi-Fi or electrical infrastructure – addressing the primary barrier to ag-tech adoption on ranches. The device, mounted where cattle naturally gather, uses deep-learning models trained on 700GB of bovine biometric data to achieve 99.8% USDA-validated accuracy detecting pink eye and up to 70% accuracy identifying bovine respiratory disease. Trial results show $100,000 in savings for 2,000-head stocker operations through targeted treatment rather than mass antibiotic use, with the company currently monitoring approximately 10,000 head monthly across Kansas
.The system delivers stress-free monitoring with 48-hour early warnings, operates on solar power and claims to maintain reliability in mud, dust and extreme weather conditions.
“Ranchers don’t have Wi-Fi in their operations, and they don’t have power lines running through their pastures,” said Shekhar Gupta, CEO of MyAnIML. “By designing the intelligence to live entirely on the device, we’ve eliminated the infrastructure barrier. We’re delivering a solution built for how ranches actually operate, allowing for targeted treatment rather than the mass use of antibiotics.”
AI-generated mobility data contributing to new genetic traits in development
Research from the Council on Dairy Cattle Breeding and University of Minnesota is using millions of daily mobility assessments from GEA’s CattleEye video system to develop two new genetic traits: mobility, derived from AI-generated scores measuring how cows walk, and hoof health, based on lesion data from professional trimmers. Preliminary analysis shows mobility has 10%-30% heritability, providing a foundation for breeding more resilient herds.
GEA believes with CattleEye, it is creating a closed-loop system linking barn-level AI monitoring directly to a national breeding program, allowing farmers to use data to select for breeding stock with lower lameness risk.
“For our customers, this means lameness can not only be better managed – but that we can also make a genetic contribution to reducing it over time,” says Maximilian Jacobi, senior director of market and product management at GEA. “The project shows the added potential that emerges when AI, big data and genetics come together.”
Stress-reducing product improves pregnancy rates by 26% in dairy cows
A peer-reviewed study from Texas A&M University found that applying FerAppease – an analogue of naturally occurring maternal bovine appeasing substance – at the time of artificial insemination increased pregnancy rates from 47.7% to 60.2% in lactating Holstein cows.
The research, conducted across two commercial dairies with 375 cows, isolated FerAppease as the primary driver of improved outcomes after finding no differences in milk yield, days in milk or estrus incidence between groups. The nonhormonal product requires no prescription or meat withdrawal period and delivered an estimated 833% return on investment based on $200 per-pregnancy value and $3 per-cow product cost.
“By reducing acute stress responses, FerAppease helped improve conception rates, offering dairy producers a practical, nonhormonal tool to support herd reproductive performance,” says Dr. Rodrigo Bicalho, DVM, FERA Diagnostics & Biologicals founder and CEO. “These results provide evidence that FerAppease administered during stress-sensitive periods such as AI can help producers improve fertility and economic outcomes.”
Read more about the study here.
5 ways data integration enhances farm or ranch decision-making
True data integration goes far beyond sharing a few data points – it requires intentionality. The goal is to bring together diverse information sources in ways that improve decision-making, simplify management and sometimes even challenge traditional on-farm practices.
Read more here.
Dairy profit projections from ZISK
Projected profitability for the next 12 months for two dairy herd sizes 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 Feb. 10, 2026):
1,000-cow dairy = $267,550 (UP about $1,500 in the last two weeks)
2,500-cow dairy = $1.401 million (UP about $13,000 in the last two weeks)