Effective solutions and technology in the dairy sector are always at the forefront of Bles Dairies. It is therefore with much pride that we announce a partnership with Connecterra, an AgriTech company based in Amsterdam, that has developed an ‘intelligent’ cow-efficiency system called Ida. It is the first of its kind to use artificial intelligence (AI) to provide dairy farmers with meaningful information about their herd.
Ida, like many other cow-monitoring systems, makes use of individual cow sensors to collect raw data. However, what makes Ida different is that it sends this information directly to the cloud for analysis. For this continuous transfer of data, Ida makes use of Google’s Tensorflow, an open-source machine-learning framework.
Now, farmers can hand over complete herd monitoring and analysis to Ida, who will in turn provide farmers with highly detailed insight into the health of an individual cow, as well as an whole herd. Ida monitors the different behaviours of the cow, such as eating, ruminating, laying, walking, lameness, standing and drinking. The data is then analysed in the cloud and Ida, the intelligent dairy farming assistant, can alert and advise the farmer on three key elements: heat, health and feed.
With the use of “the cloud”, the system increases its accuracy and is also self-learning. Ida can learn from new data – information from cows located all over the world- and then combines that with other sources of data. The system not only uses information collected from the cow sensors, but also learns from the actions made by the farmers themselves. The goal is to provide insightful and personalized, accurate recommendations to the farmer.
Bles Dairies recognises the importance of the development of artificial intelligence within the dairy sector. And so by partnering with Ida and Connecterra, Bles Dairies aims to contribute to more insight-driven efficient dairy production around the world.
