The Reason Behind John Deere and DeLaval’s Sustainable Partnership

Earlier this fall, two well-known companies, John Deere and DeLaval, joined forces and formed a strategic partnership to create the Milk Sustainability Center (MSC). This cloud-based ecosystem will be open for partners to join to provide dairy producers with the data they need for a holistic view of their operation.

MSC is designed to monitor nutrient-use efficiency (NUE) for nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) across the producer’s entire farm, specific fields or within just their herd. The MSC will allow farms to benchmark their performance to other dairy operations and identify areas for improvement.

Industry Benchmarks

James Petersen, dairy and livestock technology integration manager with John Deere, shares some people think sustainability isn’t profitable, but he begs to differ.

“There is plenty of data out there to suggest differently,” he says, sharing how strict European regulations could eventually come across the pond to the U.S. “There could be requests from the government, so if you don’t get on board with this today, you are likely to be out of business tomorrow.”

Data from John Deere Operations Center and DeLaval can be automatically pulled into the MSC to reduce manual input and ensure high data quality. Dairy farmers, consultants, dealers, and other partners can also be invited to view data in MSC. 

Petersen says a big part of the sustainability center is the benchmarking feature that producers really want to know more about.

“Essentially, you can get benchmarking data from operations of your scale and size to understand here's where I'm at, but am I good enough and where do I currently stand,” he says. “Being able to benchmark yourself gives you goals to shoot for at the end of the day.”

Darius Lane, public relations manager at John Deere, shares both John Deere operators and DeLaval have been collecting data on how farms run economically—from inputs, fuel, fertilizers and chemicals—everything that goes into the land, as well as the cows.

“In order to tell that overall profitability and sustainability story, we need to merge those two data sets to draw even more insights about how the farming operation is performing and how you producers can achieve and set some of those goals they want,” he says.

Mutual Values

Lane says it all started with a conversation with the two companies that have very similar goals in mind.

“When we started talking it all just made sense,” he says. “DeLaval was looking for that holistic picture as well. We didn't know anything about the animals, and they didn't know anything about the agronomics, and it was a perfect marriage that's come together with a long-standing partnership here.”

Lars Bergmann, executive vice president of digital services at DeLaval, calls the partnership a match made in Heaven.

“We are quite honored to be working with John Deere,” he says, adding that they welcome other industry companies and organizations to join the MSC.

“We want to make this inclusive,” he says. 

Bergmann says dairy farmers are seeking ways to decrease their environmental footprint and improve sustainability.

“The Milk Sustainability Center will help dairy farmers achieve their goals and address growing needs of dairy processors, retailers, government, and ultimately, consumers,” he says.

The initial version of MSC will be released in summer 2024 and will be free of charge. The companies said a more advanced, premium version with extended capabilities will be released at a later date.