WESTERN PRODUCER — John Deere and DeLaval have created a way for dairy farmers to bring together data from across their entire farms, not just from crops or the barn.
The companies have created the Milk Sustainability Center, which will consolidate data from dairy farmers for evaluation and decision-making around sustainability impact and efficiency.
Farmers might manage their milking with data systems from DeLaval, or another milking equipment supplier. Then they have other systems that manage their herd health and genetics. Some of those mix with overall herd management, like DairyComp. Few dairy farm software packages integrate field operations, which take a whole other group of software to manage.
That’s where the Milk Sustainability Center fits in.
“It’s such a complex system that very often farmers, they very well know what to do, what is the right thing to do, but sometimes it’s too much of an effort for them to gather the right data to support the decision making,” says Benjamin Buechner, manager of production systems advanced engineering at John Deere.
The Milk Sustainability Center had a place in the John Deere display at Agritechnica, the huge farm machinery show in Hannover, Germany, that ran in November. The John Deere display showcased products that work in two different production systems, small grains and livestock.
Buechner was joined by staff from DeLaval and Dairy Data Warehouse, a DeLaval subsidiary that helps the dairy sector clean data from disparate sources and competing companies so that it can be used together to make decisions on farms.
Dairy Data Warehouse was missing the crop-side data, says Laurine Hetterscheid, of Dairy Data Warehouse and the project manager for the center.
“You get the feed on the feed mixer and into the software that we see and that the farmers work with, but what happened before that wasn’t visible to us.”
The effort is driven by demand around the world to measure nitrogen and carbon intensity, especially in Europe, but bringing the field and barn data into one place can also help farmers benchmark and make management decisions around efficiency and nutrient costs.
Canadian dairy farmers have committed to producing net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, so this type of measurement will have value in Canada.
Farmers will use the tool to monitor their nutrient and carbon efficiency, but will then be able to put in target numbers to evaluate where future changes will have an effect.
“Is the needle moving or is it not? Is it really worth doing that effort?” asks Buechner. “Because especially these breeding efforts, like longevity, first age at calving, that’s something you don’t do overnight, right? It’s a three to five years effort.”
The system is set up to allow farmers to benchmark their operation when it comes to key performance indicators including carbon footprint per kilogram of milk, which relates to carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, along with nutrient-use efficiency, which connects use of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium related to what’s achieved from the use of those nutrients.
“You convert more into edible protein output, and that’s going to save you some money, no doubt,” says Buechner. “The more efficiently you produce your milk, the more efficiently you convert your nitrogen that you put into your field into protein outputs in grass or starch and corn. There’s something in your pocket, right? You do something to reduce your emissions and you save some money.”
DeLaval and John Deere are the first companies to commit to enabling farmers to make data available for the Milk Sustainability Center, but they hope that other companies will come on board soon so that no matter what type of equipment a farm uses, farmers will be able to benchmark their farms easily.
There is no cost to use the Milk Sustainability Center, says Hetterscheid. Farmers will incur costs if they can’t already gather the data at the farm level. The centre will go live next summer in North America and parts of Europe, but farmers can sign up now to be notified when it is ready for use.
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