A growing range of cow-wearable technologies have become available to New Zealand farmers in recent years, and more are adopting it to pursue potential gains in efficiency and productivity.
DairyNZ senior scientist Dr Callum Eastwood says the technology is a hot topic among farmers, and there are many questions about how to get the most out of their investment.
He and senior scientist Dr Susanne Meier set out to capture these unanswered questions by directly asking farmers and rural professionals.
“This gap needed to be filled, so we’ve worked with farmers using a range of tech to find out how to support them best to get more out of their data, ” Susanne said.
“We ran a workshop with farmers experienced with wearables, particularly those with ideas about what the technology could do for them in the future.”
Rural professionals were also involved, sharing what they saw as knowledge gaps that DairyNZ research could help address.
“We wanted farmer-endorsed research questions that are practical and credible, and would deliver real value on-farm.”
The outcome was exciting, Susanne said, with 12 potential research questions narrowed down to five priorities (see breakout box) for a three-year project.
“Benchmarking was a key area of interest — farmers wanted to be able to compare animal health and reproduction metrics for their farm system and also in their region, to see what high performance really looks like and find opportunities for improvement.”
Farmers also wanted to understand new key performance indicators (KPIs) from wearable data and how they link to the established KPIs that already drive farm performance. For example, exploring how rumination and activity levels might relate to in-calf rates and profitability.
The next step for DairyNZ researchers is turning the priorities into research workstreams.
“We are developing a three-year plan based on farmers’ priorities,” Susanne says.
“We will start with benchmarking, then build a dataset linked to farm KPIs. Farmers and rural professionals will stay involved with annual feedback sessions.”
This story first appeared in Inside Dairy, the official publication of DairyNZ.
