Author: Kristine Piccart (ILVO) - Date: January 4, 2019

Last november, Kristine Piccart -researcher at ILVO, the Flanders research institute for agriculture, fisheries & food- gave a presentation on the progress and challenges of precision dairy farming at a seminar organized by Dairy Global at Eurotier. 

Pictured: Kristine Piccart (ILVO) at the Dairy Global event at Eurotier 2018.

In light of increasing herd sizes and growing farms, we hear a lot about precision dairy farming. Precision dairy farming is the practice of using technologies to continuously and automatically monitor the health, behavior and production of individual cows in real-time. It allows farmers to maximize the potential of each individual cow, and save on labor in the meantime. Farmers can quickly pick up on health problems in cows, intervene sooner and potentially save on antibiotics in the long run.

Thanks to precision dairy farming, it is possible to shift the focus back to individual cows, while simultaneously keeping an overview of the whole herd. However, there are downsides to the digital revolution as well. Many of the new technologies still operate in isolation and are unable to communicate with each other, since there is no platform (yet) capable of integrating different data streams from different manufacturers. Users are also becoming increasingly aware of data privacy and data ownership issues. 

The presentation itself is available for download. 

Source: Dairy Global