Title: Dairy Cow Management System; Industry: Manufacturing ;
Background - Microsoft’s SMC clients are leaders in the cow-focused technology space with products such as cow-focused milking systems and automation solutions including software and robots designed for a cow’s comfort, health, and performance. The company’s focus is commitment to dairy excellence for the farmer’s cows in terms of milking (gently, quickly, and completely) and also improving the productivity and profitability of the herd. Also, Alta Genetics focuses on solutions for optimizing heard genetics in terms of dairy cattle devising strategies for access to products/programs to help the farmers create their best future herd. According to a Statista report there are estimated 9.45 million milk cows in the United States and sales of milk from the cows totaling $36.7 billion (in 2017), accounting for 9.5 percent of total U.S. agriculture sales (Reference: usda.gov report). Advancement in Dairy farming processes such as Robotic milking is claimed by manufacturers to have benefits for dairy cow welfare and productivity, to reduce labor costs and to liberate farmers and farm workers from the routines of conventional milking. These technology advancements have helped in driving major benefits for the dairy industry in terms of reducing costs, improving quality of production, increased efficiency, sustainability, and improved performances in the wellbeing of dairy cows and their general well-being.
Customer Pain Point: Companies support the farmers in managing their livestock (dairy cow) by embracing digital technology in the dairy farming processes. The areas of focus for the industry as a business include:
- Cow Wellbeing i.e., health (vitals) of the livestock. Here wellbeing or welfare can point to the state of physical and mental wellbeing of the cows which directly/indirectly contribute to the health and thus the productivity of the farm. The industry demands a proactive
- Smart Agriculture for effective farm output in terms of milk production and contribute to environment-focused Sustainable farming solutions
- Optimized heard management to drive effective monitoring of the heard.
The Dairy Farming industry also has the technical challenges below to address the above business pain-points:
- Data-driven approach: This area has significant challenges in reducing the cost to data collection, improving the accuracy of the datasets, real-time analytics, and optimized management of the assets (including software and hardware devices).
- Governance and Management: The industry requires access to solutions for effective governance/management of their assets in terms of software and hardware devices. This aspect includes access to the solutions in remote locations and a support model to address any issues. The employees may have different functions such as dairy industry employees (e.g. administrators, developers) and farmers (i.e the customers and users), the solutions should be able to satisfy the requirements of each persona’s.
- Consumable solutions: The industry’s customers i.e. the farmers and users must have access to the solutions in a simplified, seamless, and consumable model
Our Solution: Utilize Microsoft Azure as the platform of choice for Dairy Cow management to address the industry challenges and drive innovation for the end-users (farmers) with Cloud.
Demo Assets: Demo Link: https://app-csa-contest-ekc8a8b0b7a4d0bw.z01.azurefd.net/
GitHub Assets: GitHub - https://github.com/vrengar/Dairy-Cow-Management-System
Reference Doc: https://microsoft-my.sharepoint.com/:w:/p/vrengarajan/EcSX3lXd4bVCtMn45Ue3UOAB9EmtWmzFhHgseTr-Xf9Umw?e=FqUcqS
Architecture:
