Talking Dairy & Data with Cabot Creamery
Dairy, Data, & Demand Dropoff
COVID-19 has impacted all consumer dairy segments except shelf-stable dairy milk. While the demand dropout couldn’t have been predicted, agrifood tech and real-time data can be used to help create a more robust, resilient, and transparent agri-food supply chain.
With so many farms in flux during the Coronavirus pandemic, I’ve been eager to find out just how much farmers have reassessed their operations. To learn more, I sat down with Jenni Tilton-Flood, a dairy farmer at Flood Brothers Farm, LLC, and Cabot Creamery Cooperative Farmer Spokesperson in the latest session of Headstorm University. Let’s listen to a few of the highlights as Jenni talks dairy and data.
Two Groups Of Farmers
The Takeaway
The reality is you’ll either have a farmer who is embracing technology, or a farmer who doesn’t acknowledge they’re embracing it. It’s no different from any other industry in that sense. But when a farmer refuses to use a smartphone to connect to the outside world, yet turns around and goes to YouTube to look up how to repair their $500,000 software-laden John Deere, there’s an obvious cognitive dissonance to address.
We can’t deny the history of farm labor being so hands-on — but a farm is a business, so we also can’t ignore that so much can now be done faster and with better integration, thanks to tech. That’s not just about robots as helping hands; it also means growing and harvesting data just like we do crops.
Fitbits & Facial Recognition
The Takeaway
Traceability has really been highlighted by the dairy industry, with so much integration in the supply chain allowing for a tested carton of milk to be linked back to the exact farms who contributed to its production. But then again, it’s hard to say how much of that process is automated right now, even if it seems clear.
Cabot farms produce a ton of data on its cows (for instance, on many dairy farms cows wear Fitbit-style devices), but it wouldn’t make sense to burden the farm with processing and managing all that raw data. That’s even more true as we get into the really big data like facial recognition, where algorithms can identify individual cows and track their behaviors. For all that granular behavioral data, there are applications and third parties who crunch the numbers and send back actionable reports. You could extend that approach to your entire farm if you wanted, but historically this isn’t an industry full of folks who like change… so it will come down to who’s ready, and who struggles to catch up.
Lactating Mamas Don’t Like That
The Takeaway
Jenni and the team feeding the herd at their farm prefer Excel spreadsheets to monitor and optimize feed based on incoming reports. Of course, farmers embrace a wide spectrum of technologies to solve for feed — some go as far as complete hands-off automation.
Again, it’s a decision farmers have to make in balancing control vs. productivity. From Jenni’s perspective, their best hard drives sit on shoulders, but that doesn’t mean they turn a blind eye to technology.
That’s a wrap on our session, but I’d love to continue this discussion in the comments. Thanks again to Jenni for joining us!
About Jenni
Jenni Tilton-Flood is a farm family member of Maine’s largest family dairy farm. Her family carries on a 200+ year old tradition of agriculture in Maine’s Dairy Capital, producing 5% of Maine’s milk as proud Cabot farmers/owners. Her family’s farm stewards 3,400 cows, heifers and calves, and milks 1,700 of them 3x daily. They ship 17,000 gallons of milk each day 75 miles down the road to H.P.Hood in Portland, Maine. For the past 20+ years, her experience has run the gamut from calf care and tractor operation to providing tours and maintaining a presence for the farm on social media platforms and advocating/agvocating whenever and wherever.
About the Author
Dominique Pianelli is a Project Leader and founder of the Headstorm AgTech Special Interest Group. She is an outgoing technologist with a desire to use her knowledge of technology and business to build a better world. #womenintech #sustainability #agritech #technology #engineering #foodtech #supplychain #data #agriculture
Originally published on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/talking-dairy-data-cabot-creamery-dominique-pianelli/
