Big Dairy Enters the Era of Big Data

After Steve and Lori Dockendorf’s two oldest children left their dairy farm to go to college, the husband-and-wife owners of a 100-cow farm in Watkins, Minn., had to figure out how to replace the labor they’d lost. The traditional solution would have been to hire a couple of extra hands. Instead, the Dockendorfs went with robots: robots to help feed the cows, robots to help clean the barn, even robots that can milk the cows. The farmers used to spend three hours milking, twice a day. "Now," says Lori, "we wake up in the morning, and the robots have already milked all the cows."

Fortunately, technology has made deep inroads into the world of dairy farming, helping manage day-to-day chores and collecting and analyzing the large batches of data a herd of cattle generates daily.

By Sam Grobart

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