PHOTO: DREAMSTIME
PHOTO: CATTLEEYE
PHOTO: CATTLEEYE
SMART FARMING ▶▶▶
The technology sends insights to the farmer’s mobile phone or farm software system.
CattleEye’s video analytics, power ed by deep learning AI, deliver insights to farmers.
an alert is created, which is then sent to the farmer’s mobile phone or to their farm software system,” Canning explains. “They would then get a foot trimmer or a vet to look at the cow and fix the cow’s feet.”
Using cameras The technology behind CattleEye is far from simplistic, but getting the technology up and running on a farm is not a complicated task: “Due to the coronavirus, it was difficult to go and visit some of the pilot farms, but we discovered that the farmers could easily put up the cameras themselves. May- be this was, in some ways, a good thing because it demon- strated the ease with which the system could be installed. The farmers could go to Amazon, buy the cameras and install the system themselves,” says Canning. “We are unique in that we are using simple security cameras instead of specific
hardware which then needs to be installed in the barn. We use a € 120 security camera, advise the farmer where to place it, and then the camera connects to the cloud. The AI then starts to learn, to find the cows and derive insights about them which are then delivered to the farmer.” CattleEye conducted its first pilot on Canning’s father’s farm to learn about some of the problems dairy farmers face. Since then, the company’s pilots have expanded, including but not limited to a pilot at a research farm in Dorset of 5,000 cows. In addition, Tesco, the UK’s largest retailer, has been engaged with CattleEye for the past 12 months: “Tesco currently re- quires their dairy farmers to mobility score on a regular basis, but this takes the farmer a long time and it is sometimes diffi- cult for the farmer to be consistent in the scoring, so they were very attracted to the idea of doing the scoring automat- ically,” Canning explains. As a next step, the University of Liv- erpool will validate the company’s technology and trial it in three farms. “Our plan is to run a pilot in January with the functionality being widely available in April of next year,” Canning says. As well as running pilots in the UK, CattleEye is running a pi- lot in the US and is planning for more pilots by January of next year, potentially also in South America. “We want to learn more about the cow,” says Canning. “Today, we are fo- cused on current insights, and we think AI will give us other insights about the cow that we don’t even know about yet. We’ll gather data, and this will then allow us to correlate oth- er insights that may improve the health and welfare of the dairy cow.” Canning concludes by saying: “The brilliant thing about AI is that it continues to learn; we teach it one thing and then it gets better and better, finding insights that we haven’t thought of yet. We expect that data will lead us in new and exciting directions.”
More info can be found on:
www.cattleeye.com 26 ▶DAIRY GLOBAL | Volume 7, No. 4, 2020
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