SmaXtec enters U.S. commercial market
Cow ultrasound imaging company to pair images with herd data
The rumen bolus company that has been selling its boluses commercially in Europe and Oceania for years is coming to the U.S. SmaXtec recently announced it would sell and support its bolus technology in the U.S. with an office based in Madison, Wisconsin.
The company claims its rumen boluses can detect internal body changes inside of a cow within ± 0.18°F of accuracy. Most impressively the company claims its boluses can detect diseases up to four days prior to external, clinical signs. That’s two days faster than most activity monitoring companies claim they can detect cow health deviations. The company claims its faster detection is “the new gold standard.”
SmaXtec currently operates commercially in Germany, UK, the Netherlands as well as in Australia and New Zealand. However, the company’s technology has been in use on research dairies in the U.S. at Oregon State University, University of Kentucky and the William Miner Agricultural Research Institute.
Largest robotic milking research facility in North America
to open in Canada
The University of British Columbia (UBC) Dairy Education and Research Center recently announced that it will remodel its 20-year-old parlor into a fully robotic milking facility. The installation of six milking robots will make it the largest robotic milking research facility in North America.
“Becoming a research farm milking 100% of our herd with robots is significant as it is representative of dairy farms adapting to robotics worldwide,” says Nelson Dinn, UBC business operations manager. “We want to position the UBC Dairy Center as a technology hub at the forefront of dairy cattle research globally.”
The renovation project will have a flexible design incorporating a total of six GEA robots in two existing research barns, housing about 250 lactating cows, along with one training robot. GEA will install its R9500 box robots for the project.
“We’d like to take what we’ve learned with conventional milking and dive deeper using new data we can obtain from automated milking systems,” says Ronaldo Cerri, UBC director and associate professor in dairy cattle reproduction.
Ultrasound scanner will pair ultrasound images
with herd data
A company that offers a handheld ultrasound monitor for use to preg-check cows recently announced that its hardware will now be able to pair with herd management software. This will enable the device to display key performance data about a cow within the view of the ultrasound technician.
IMV Technologies will be launching the integration this summer for its Easi-Scan:Go ultrasound scanner for famers using HERDEmobil, a European-based herd management software.
“Data networking has been on the agenda of our software for years. As an independent herd management program, we depend on effective connectivity. Our users from the field of veterinary medicine and fertility management are thus moving even closer to the livestock farm and will further deepen their caring activities.” Dirk Leuschke, CEO of dsp-Agrosoft GmbH, the company that owns HERDEmobil.
The company’s software catalogs herd information for more than 1 million cows on 3,000 farms worldwide.
The two companies claim what they’ve done is a first-of-its-kind integration of herd management data and ultrasound imagery.
Milk Moovement featured in Progressive Dairy
A cloud-based platform that optimizes milk pickup and gives farmers a tool for faster feedback about overall herd production and milk quality was recently featured in Progressive Dairy magazine.
“By having shared access to data, we’re able to identify herd health issues earlier, evaluate those items and then provide preventative action.”
Read more about the software’s capabilities here.
Who’s reading The Cow Tech Report?
Daniel Foy, Co-Founder & CEO, AgriGates
Where are you located?
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I work across the U.S., UK and EU with producers, industry, and academics.
What do you do in the cattle or tech industry?
Over the last five years, I have been working in the U.S. to understand how a UK/European designed wearable sensor technology fits into the U.S. dairy market, where the value in wearable data is, who are the academics and experts in this area, and how does the farm understand and value that data [intelligence].
Now I’m leading a co-founded start-up called AgriGates. I am building data ecosystems for agriculture that allows producers to integrate their data – securely – for enhanced business intelligence.
I have an interest in using data to solve some of the hardest problems we have in agriculture, to create great products that help rural communities, improve livestock welfare and a life worth living for animals, while promoting sustainability through regenerative agriculture.
In May 2021, I started as a volunteer working with the Dairy Cattle Welfare Council. After being accepted as a member of the council, I joined the membership committee. I hope to help in promoting the great research and work being done within the dairy sector to promote dairy cattle welfare.
Which cow technology interests you most?
I get drones, robots, cameras and other sensors around the farm are great pieces of hardware technology, but I’m most interested in how to apply software technologies to integrate those disparate hardware data systems into one secure location for a producer, so that ownership and control of that data can be managed by the producer.
Bringing together data from livestock, the farm environment and other data systems across the farm can create usable, useful, valid, and valuable insights that can help with a multitude of issues from illness and disease detection, management strategies and key performance indicators [this is business intelligence]. It can also help with giving direction to large themes like welfare and regenerative agriculture.
We have got to recognize that farms today are data-rich, but beginning to gathering that disparate data, cleaning it, while giving it order, is a challenge, but also a huge opportunity.
Building a data platform like this for producers is a conduit system that allows for the greater deployment of advanced technologies like blockchain and AI. I do believe this is where we want to go as a sector and meet the challenges we have.
What do you think would further accelerate cow tech adoption?
Understanding big data; how it flows and how to management it and the tools required for that are a must in the dairy industry today and into the future, we need to drive adoption and education around these tools and get comfortable with these terms. It’s the future. We need to recognize that there are different levels of users from the farmer, to the expert, to industry.
IoT and enhanced connectivity is coming, so we need to understand these tools too, and be able to efficiently leverage the value of data as it is part of the future for the food animal industry.
Data ownership and security and a clear definition on ownership of data is so important to pre- and post-algorithmic processing. For me, the producer owns the data, and we need to protect producers, help them understand what that means and what tools they need to consider to enhance their decision-making. We need producers and all who work on-farm to begin seeing that data as important as the milk in the tank. Data has value too; we just need to unlock it and others will want it.
Cow welfare, I do believe that we are at a point that technology can help us deal with the issues that we have, and I am excited to be part of promoting this work and research.
Swarm machines more likely to appear before the autonomous tractor does
Progressive Dairy recently published a report about the ongoing research and development of autonomous field tractors. Some efforts of that research may be available sooner than a fully autonomous tractor.
“Owning and operating a fully autonomous fleet is still years away from becoming a reality; however, it seems many farms will have the opportunity to access autonomous technology as some of it trickles down and is incorporated in conventional equipment.”
Read more here.
Profit projections from ZISK
Projected profitability for two dairy herd sizes has HELD STEADY since the beginning of the summer 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 July 11, 2021):
1,000-cow dairy = $249,620 (UP about $2,600 since the end of May)
2,500-cow dairy = $1.331 million (DOWN about $14,000 since the end of May)