At Tony Louters' dairy farm in California's Central Valley, cows don't wear bells—they sport high-tech collars loaded with sensors and WiFi. These collars, developed by Merck, act as early-warning systems, flagging health issues before the cows even show symptoms. Louters credits the system with saving a cow—and likely hundreds of dollars in lost milk—after his computer pinged him at sunrise about a subtle shift in behavior. A quick probiotic fix later, crisis averted. "It's the closest we can get to talking to the cows," Louters tells the New York Times.
Precision farming—fueled by AI, sensors, and falling tech costs—is sweeping agriculture. The livestock-monitoring market alone is now worth over $5 billion, with Merck's collars monitoring about 20% of America's dairy cows for $3 a month per animal. Collars track everything from chewing (to monitor digestion) to location, feeding their data into algorithms that alert farmers to the smallest irregularity.
Automation is making it possible for dairies to expand without adding staff. Annie Vannurden, who runs a 5,000-cow operation in South Dakota, says the collars let her keep tabs on thousands of cows while her team only checks on a handful each day. Healthier cows mean more milk—and those few extra pounds of milk per cow add up fast. Even with connectivity issues, the collars can jolt milk production by up to 10%, reports WebProNews.
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Advocates say tech is arriving just in time. Farmers face soaring costs, labor shortages, and tighter immigration rules. And while the landscape is changing, with drones, robotic tractors, and AI-powered apple sorters joining the mix, the stakes remain high: keeping farms profitable, animals healthy, and production up. Says Brandt Kreuscher, a dairy business development manager at Merck: "If you landed on Earth and didn't speak the language, and you spent 24 hours on a dairy, you would leave completely, utterly convinced, no pun intended, that the cows are running the planet."
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