PILOT 4.1 Dairy Farmers' Dashboard for the Entire Milk and Meat Production Value Chain

Dairy Farmers’ Dashboard for the Entire Milk and Meat Production Value Chain

CHALLENGE

Farmers have to handle an increasing number of digital systems and solutions that affect their daily work as well as production and investment decisions. Today’s digital solutions do not communicate or integrate well enough together and are not largely based on the needs of the farmer. In addition, administrative and production systems produce different types of data that is difficult to use for decision support. Thus, the dataflow for farmers is a big challenge and equally an opportunity for business development in the sector.

AIM

The main aim of this pilot is to develop a farmer’s digital dashboard delivering a better view or outlook of the farm activities and the farmer’s cooperation with both private and public actors. This will ensure a more efficient use of digital tools by the farmer and a better and more customised decision support. In addition over time, the pilot aims to develop a new system for data collection, modelling and calculation of greenhouse gas emissions on farm level, and a new model for milk prognosis that are essential to optimise production in economic terms, animal numbers, milk quality and feed production.

HOW

With regard to the farmers’ dashboard element of the pilot, Agricultural Dataflow, pilot partner, will build data infrastructure and models of farmers’ dashboard for external suppliers, researchers, farmers and advisors. These are based on the existing dataflow infrastructure that 14,000 farmers use and the systems that are developed in technical parts of DEMETER. In the development process, farmers and related partners and industries in Norway will be involved. New apps and solutions for Norwegian farmers will be launched with easier registration and insight to continuously improve production. The focus from pilot partner, Mimiro is to use data from more than 500 dairy farms with automatic milking systems and apply machine learning techniques to develop algorithms for milk yield forecasting and culling strategy.

BENEFIT

The main benefits of developing a farmer’s dashboard are more efficient production and better investment decisions. In addition, there are benefits for related partners with data access and solutions that optimise their production and activities. The pilot is expected to share knowledge and solutions regarding the main decision variables for each farmer and how these variables can be presented in one overall dashboard. It will also give information on how to get system suppliers and partners of the farmers to cooperate and interact, sharing data and web-interfaces. The cost-benefit for the farmer, related businesses and society will be detailed and what business models can be used for the developed tools in the pilot will be outlined.