Producers Share Their Technology Wish List
From gadgets to big ticket items, technology has a place in the dairy sector. Recently on a Farm Journal Milk Business webinar, three dairy producers shared what technology is on their dairy team’s wish list.
According to Ken McCarty with McCarty Family Farms in Kansas, his pie-in-the-sky technology is based on data utilization.
“We visited some companies in the past, using artificial intelligence to try to glean insights from the various data silos on our farms. And that to me is really kind of the next frontier for our farms. We don’t know what we don’t know. So being able to have various silos – whether that be environmental data, performance data, feeding activity data, or cow activity data – integrated into our system can help our managers understand what’s happening on our farms.”
Understanding what’s driving increases or decreases in productivity is a crucial part of McCarty’ operation. This allows them to know where some of their big opportunities lie.
“We take technology extremely seriously and have worked really hard to standardize and collect valuable and actionable data on our farms. But it's extremely cumbersome to try to work with that all the different data points. So, we hope that the industry can create some sort of integration platform that can pull all those different data silos together and help us understand our farms and our cows,” he shares.
Ryan Junio with Four J Jerseys in Pixley, California, concurs with McCarty, stating that autonomous equipment is high on his technology wish list.
“We see that as a big game changer and labor saver. We've already incorporated some precision spraying equipment and we can see the big savings there. Anything that may drive input and labor costs down and create more efficiencies and less headaches in terms of management is worth investing in. I think that's a goal here at our farm,” he says. “We see a lot of data and it can become overwhelming at times. We are learning how to utilize what have and become more efficient overall.”
In Wisconsin, Chema Ortiz, a herd management specialist for Milk Source in Wisconsin, says that the team at Milk Source understands that reducing human interaction with cows creates less stress.
“Any form of technology that will allow us to accomplish that, I think we're going to benefit from,” he says.
Ortiz shares that Milk Source is currently in a trial with an artificial intelligence company working with cameras.
“As that technology gets better, it's definitely something that we're going to look into trying to utilize the best we can,” Ortiz shares, outlining from their point of view, technology investment must either reduce labor, improve cow health and reproduction.
To listen to the entire conversation with these three producers talk more about technology and how it is playing a big role on their farms to propel their dairy forward, click on https://fjwebinars.com/account/register/dairy-herd-management/167
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