
DeLaval and John Deere have co-launched a digital ecosystem to help dairy farmers become more sustainable and efficient. The cloud-based Milk Sustainability Center is a brand-neutral interface that lets producers remotely streamline their operations by monitoring nutrient-use efficiency for nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and carbon dioxide equivalent.
“We’re creating a center that can collect data from different systems,” says Joaquin Azocar, market solution manager of farm management systems for DeLaval. The two brands are collaborating with a Dutch company, Dairy Data Warehouse, “which specializes in capturing data from different sources and making it standardized,” Azocar says.
Practically, the Milk Sustainability Center, which was first announced in September, lets producers make sustainable and profit-driven decisions. The interface can identify improvement areas by comparing a farm’s performance with other benchmark values.
The program can give recommendations to reduce nutrient losses. It also can simulate theoretical scenarios using new technologies or strategies, outputting projected nutrient-use efficiency, carbon footprint and profitability.
Data can be viewed from a desktop or via a mobile app. Farmers can curate data by selecting the entire farm, specific fields or a particular herd. They can choose to share it with consultants, dealers and other partners.
“DeLaval brings data from the barn and the dairy cattle operation. Deere can bring data from the field,” says Courtney Schlichte, manager of small ag marketing for John Deere. After authorization, data from DeLaval Plus and the John Deere Operations Center can automatically be pulled into the Milk Sustainability Center. Barn or equipment data also can be put in manually, and the center is notably open to collaborating with other brands.
Its long-term goal, Schlichte says, is to bring the dairy sector closer to being a net-zero emissions industry. She says the initiative aims to help “farmers continue to be good stewards of the land by making sure, when we talk about nitrogen-use efficiency, that we're increasing that to benefit for the longer term and reducing the CO2 equivalent as well. The end benefit for farmers here is the information.”
The inaugural version of the Milk Sustainability Center will be released this fall in North America and select European Union countries, and it will be free.
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