A flick of the wrist. A click of the phone. That’s all it takes to access a moment-by-moment review of your body’s functions, if you’re among the nearly one-third of Americans who own a smartwatch.
And now, for a herd of dairy cows at the Grafton County Farm, who were outfitted in November with a new device that can track their movement and health.
For the cows, “wearable technology” is a bit more intimate. No wrists are involved. The tracking device comes in the shape of a pill that lives in one of a cow’s stomachs.
The project is supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The farm will share data with researchers at the University of New Hampshire, who are studying how these technologies help farmers better manage their herds’ health and reproduction.
These kinds of trackers are becoming increasingly popular in the dairy industry, said Sarah Allen, the dairy specialist at the University of New Hampshire Extension.
“When these are on cows, you get how often they’re moving, how often they’re laying down, how often they’re eating, how often they’re drinking, how their stomach is digesting,” she said.
But, Allen said, sometimes it’s difficult to figure out what to do with so much data. A team led by Dr. Claira Seely at the University of New Hampshire is looking into how to use the data from these trackers more effectively.
Seely said with labor shortages in the dairy industry, technologies like the one she’s using for her research can possibly help with jobs humans are now doing.
“We can use these technologies to tell us when cows are in heat, so we don’t have to use hormones to breed them,” she said. The sensors can also alert farmers to when their cows aren’t feeling well.
That feature has been helpful for Ben White, who has been the herdsman at Grafton County Farm for 14 years. He said having the technology in his cows has been like having an extra person on the farm.
One of White’s cows, who recently birthed a calf, was producing too much milk. Then, her tracker showed she went from being active to having no activity.
“I was able to go in earlier and able to give her medicine, when I normally wouldn’t have been there that time of day,” White said. “I was able to basically save the cow.”
White says he’s also hoping the trackers will be useful for understanding when his cows are in heat. Usually, he does that by watching them and tracking their cycles himself. But he’s started to see the technology pick up on his cows’ extra activity during those times.
“I don't want to have computers run the world, but it's nice to be able to, if I could, save a cow because of this system picking up something,” he said. “It costs a lot to raise animals and stuff like that. So every second counts.”
White says he’s reporting back to the research team as he uses the data he’s collecting from his cows. He’s had other farmers ask questions about the technology. And he says he’s hoping to continue putting trackers into young cows when they’re born on the farm, to help him track the health of his herd into the future.
