Placing sensors inside cows can help monitor the health of a herd
athletes, dairy cows have exacting nutritional requirements. “If you’re slightly up on protein, or down on carbs, you’ll see a drop in milk production,” says Robbie Walker, the boss of Keenan Systems, an Irish firm which makes feed-mixing wagons.
For that reason, the firm’s latest products have gone digital. With the help of Intel, a big American chipmaker, Keenan has developed a computer that can be attached to its wagons. Every day the firm’s nutritionists load the computer with the herd’s dietary requirements. Sensors on the wagon weigh what the farmer puts into the mixer and compare it with what the recipe calls for. “It’s a bit like making a cake,” says Mr Walker.
Keenan is not the only firm trying to computerise cattle-farming. Cainthus, another Irish company, is one of several startups hoping to use computer vision to boost farmyard productivity. It uses cameras to track cows in barns and fields, relying on machine learning to analyse the images.
For now, he says, the company is working mainly on Friesian and Holstein cows, whose distinctive markings “mean they’re basically walkingcodes”, though he hopes to expand to other breeds eventually. The technology works well enough to have persuaded Cargill, an agriculture-focused conglomerate and America’s largest private company, to take a minority stake in Cainthus in 2018.
An alternative approach is to put the sensors inside the cows themselves. An Austrian firm called smatec has developed a sensor that can be swallowed. It lodges inside the reticulum, one of a cow’s four stomachs, and stays there for the rest of the animal’s life, monitoring body temperature, movement and stomach acidity, and uploading the results when the cow is near a wireless detector.tec’s co-founder, those data can be used for all kinds of things.
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