Dairy and data have become synonymous. The interactions between the two entities only grow with each passing year. In order to collect all that data, the dairy community has embraced technology. However, not all that technology works in the unique environment found on our dairy farms.
“They are promoted as plug and play. However, plug and play is the reality for some technology,” explained long time dairy technology guru, Jeffrey Bewley. He went on to explain that a lot of technology company startups lack dairy expertise, and that’s one of the many reasons technologies targeted to dairy farms can fail.
“This is one of my old bosses who was an accountant,” he said, pointing to the screen at the 62nd annual gathering of the National Mastitis Council. “I got him to help collect urine pH samples one day. As you can see from the image, he was not thrilled with the proposition,” continued Bewley of his former teammate who pitched in on a project.
“However, this illustrates one of the biggest problems with startups: If there is no one on the team that neither understands nor has worked with cows, they will miss major things by not understanding dairy farms and dairy cows,” said Bewley. “Technology startups need to hire somebody who has had some manure on their feet at some point in their lives,” continued the dairy analytics and innovation scientist, now with the Holstein Association USA.
About those tombstones
“I am not going to start naming technologies in the graveyard. However, let’s talk about some general observations,” said Bewley. “This is a physical form problem. This device had eight D-sized batteries that sat on the cow’s back,” he said, showing a cow side image on the screen during his presentation. “Believe it or not, the cows didn’t like that apparatus,” he continued, showing his sense of humor. “So, this device didn’t stay on the cows. This is just one of many examples where designers didn’t consider how a device would fit within the system we work in,” he said of the extreme example.
“Another grave in the dairy technology graveyard is simply too much infrastructure. Consider the number of cables and other assets needed to set up a dairy technology. At some point, the infrastructure becomes overwhelming and makes the technology impractical on our farms,” continued the dairy data specialist.
New name, same technology
“If I’m an angel investor and somebody comes to me today and says, ‘I have an idea for a Fitbit for a cow,’ my response is, ‘We are good on Fitbits for cows!’” commented Bewley, who leads the WKU SmartHolstein Lab “We have a couple dozen of them out there. We don’t need more of them. If we want innovation, let’s go into something different.”
Can the technology withstand rodents, critters, and Mother Nature?
“Rodents, insects, and other wildlife are a big, big problem,” shared Bewley. “Raccoons may be the biggest menace of them all,” he said of critters that send dairy technology to an early grave.
“I’ve also learned that lightning can strike the same place twice,” he said. “It’s a big problem in parts of the world when it comes to technology.”
“Then there’s the largest tombstone in the technology graveyard — rural conductivity limits!” Bewley said to attendees at the international conference. “A lot of these companies sit in big cities and have the very best internet connections. I live in a rural area these days, and I fully appreciate internet conductivity is not something to take for granted.
“I had a friend of mine recently who was very excited about an on-farm technology,” he began to explain of a real-world example. “However, as good as the technology was for the farm, it took them a few months to figure out how to get data to the cloud,” he said of the central Kentucky farmer’s experience. “This is not just a U.S. problem. It exists all around the world.”
Is it ready for prime time?
Then there’s miscommunication during the development stage.
“This is a big problem, particularly when we talk about start-up companies. They will come to me and say, ‘This is what our technology does.’ What they really mean to say is, ‘This is what we envision our technology doing five years from now.’
“If a farmer buys this technology and it isn’t ready for prime time, it creates a bad scenario for the entire tech world,” said Bewley, who works with dairy technology on a daily basis. As miscommunication proliferates, it morphs into mistrust of technology.
“It boils down to overpromise and underdeliver,” Bewley summed up on that matter.
