Technology has come a long way since my time time growing up on a small dairy farm in Idaho. A recent AP News article asks: “Is the world ready for cows armed with artificial intelligence?“

Answering its own question, the article observes:

No time to ruminate on that because the moment has arrived, thanks to a Dutch company that has married two technologies — motion sensors and AI — with the aim of bringing the barnyard into the 21st century.

The Dutch company, Connecterra  offers a system, “The Intelligent Dairy Farmer’s Assistant (IDA),” to monitor individual cows and predict how to deal with problems that may arise.

IDA uses a motion-sensing device attached to a cow’s neck to transmit its movements to a program driven by AI. The sensor data, when aligned repeatedly with real-world behavior, eventually allows IDA to tell from data alone when a cow is chewing cud, lying down, walking, drinking or eating.

Those indicators can predict whether a particular cow is ill, has become less productive, or is ready to breed — alerting the farmer to changes in behavior that might otherwise be easily missed.

Back in the day, my Dad knew each of his cows well, and called each of them by name.  However, modern dairies may have thousands of cows, not just a few dozen we had on our farm. Technology like IDA can really extend the ability of a dairy farmer to maximize production from all of the cows.

It does my heart good to see AI and IoT technologies applied to boost agribusiness.

In his keynote speech at Oracle Open World today, Dr. Thomas Kiessling, Chief Product and Innovation Officer of Deutsche Telekom reviewed his company’s emerging business in M2M.  One use case he described has been referred to in some circles as the “Connected Cow.” Current technology allows dairy cows to be electronically tagged for identification and equipped with temperature sensors to detect the optimum time for breeding. This can help big dairies be more efficient and productive.

When I grew up on a small dairy farm in Idaho, we weren’t nearly so high tech! But now, as we grapple with the challenges of how to administer the expanding universe of people and devices in the Internet of Things, we should also think about how to connect cows and other animals to the Internet!  After milk cows, what will be next?  Dogs and cats?  Pet hamsters?

We have quite a few milk cows in the US (about 9 million), but we have about 78 million pet dogs and 86 million cats   If we connect all them to the Internet, just think of what we could do!

But I wonder how we would establish identity trust relationships with all these connected creatures!

Great article and infographic on the SmartPlanet blog about use of smartphones and other technology in agriculture.

Telecommunications has come a long way from when I grew up in rural Idaho.  Our telephone line had a seven-minute limit on call length because of relative lack of capacity.  And even that was a step up from the party line we had when I was a little boy.