Big Data Improving Dairy Farms

Big data sounds like a scary and intimidating term, but on dairy farms it’s providing valuable information to the producer.  Joe Kelsay is a dairy farmer who gets data on all kinds of aspects of his cows’ life.

“In the milking parlor, there are milk meters at every station. There are transponder readers at every station and then the output that tells what’s going on at each of those stations in real time at the milking parlor."

There are also leg bands attached to the cows that calculate about activity about steps, milk amounts and time and much more.  Kelsay says all that information can be gathered into a specific report.

“We have a health checklist that comes out every morning. It prints out the cows that might be a little off on milk, maybe a little off on steps and the herdsman need to go take a look and see if these cows are really having a problem or just maybe it’s an aberration in the data.”

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