An app for cows???

I had to laugh at this report about a program and associated device called MooMonitor.

Eight million people in the UK now sport wearable technology, but animals wear it as well.

One such technology is something called MooMonitor, a necklace worn by cows that monitors cows’ health and fertility. Its owners describe it as ‘dairy SatNav’ and say that the MooMonitor’s technology is replicated in rockets and torpedoes.

. . .

The MooMonitor necklace connects to The Cloud and its consequent data ensures the correct allocation of energy and minerals within the animal’s feed and this results in fewer health issues for the dairy herd and improved milk yields.

Its Technical Director, Dr Edmond Harty, joined the family business in 1998 and probably knows more about mik than anybody else in Europe. Not only does he know about milk, he was also named the international Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2012 and describes MooMonitor as ‘measuring friskiness’.

“The challenge was how to monitor the behaviour of every cow in a herd day and night. The solution was wearable technology. What we figured out was that it would be possible to include accelerometers, mobile and WIFI components, a decent bit of computing power and the software to run on it and could result in a single piece of technology that each cow could wear, that’s the MooMonitor. What it does from a practical point of view is measure friskiness.

“More precisely, it measures how and how much a cow moves, the single best indicator of whether a cow is ready to get pregnant. This is vital because regular pregnancies are what keep dairy cows producing milk. Each time a farmer misses out on such an opportunity it costs him or her €250. Dairymaster is all about applying the latest gizmos and technology to make a real difference in dairy farming,” he says.

. . .

So, that pint of milk on the doorstep is more than just a pint of milk. It is a technological piece of genius produced by great minds via animals that get recurrently pregnant and wear a necklace. Now you know.

There's more at the link.

So a high-technology computerized necklace can tell when its wearer is ready to get pregnant.  I can see possibilities here . . . but no, on second thoughts, let's not go there.  This might get udderly ridiculous!





Peter