According to Sener Celik, director of agricultural data platform JoinData, the cattle farming and dairy industry is hugely advanced when it comes to machinery, innovative visions and entrepreneurship. “But if you look at collecting and using data, we’re still at the early stages,” Celik says. According to the director of the platform, this will change completely over the next five years. “Farmers and cooperatives who can’t show how their product is made by 2025 will have no sales.”
Consumers want to know what they are eating and drinking and the chain is becoming shorter and shorter. The success of initiatives such as MijnMelk.nl proves this. To remain competitive, retail will need to provide consumers with more information. Sener Celik of data platform JoinData therefore calls on cattle farmers to ‘do better than their neighbor’: “By utilizing data, you can produce more efficiently. If you do this better than a fellow cattle farmer, you have a stronger position in the chain.” Celik predicts that data in the cattle farming sector will become particularly important in the areas of feed (in relation to nitrogen emissions), manure and energy (circularity).
Data can be collected at ‘cow level’: feed intake, rumination behavior, activity, moments of insemination or use of medication. But also at the business level: feed costs or quality of milk or meat. Data is collected using machines that produce data such as a tractor, the feed robot, milking robot, moisture sensors, GPS installations, the Smart Barn technology or a pedometer around an animal’s neck. Celik: “Nedap develops pedometers that are becoming more sophisticated and last longer. Data flows through the cloud and is shared in real time. That’s where the intelligence is.”
Thanks to smart alerts on your smartphone or desktop, you can act on this data immediately. Celik: “That drives innovation. For example: you can see diseases coming earlier, so you can reduce the use of antibiotics. But also innovations further down the chain. For example, when selling meat; the fact that an animal has had a good or healthy life can also be confirmed with data.”
According to Celik, there is a lot of distrust when it comes to collecting and using data. “Fortunately, we do have an increasing awareness of the impact of data. How nice it is to see your cow’s location, its eating behavior or its somatic cell count. The farmer is an entrepreneur and must indicate which insights and connections are important for the business. Using data is experimentation: test and learn.” But it is a fact that developments are moving fast. “So just start tomorrow,” Celik says. “All farmers should have data on their priority list. Ask yourself what happens to the data every time you buy a sensor, machine or application. And an authorization on paper or via e-mail is not secure. Like a post-it in the barn with all the passwords; I still see it all too often.”
Read the original article at https://www.schippers.nl/dierherkenning-co00093/.
