Chris McCullough
A Dublin company has launched facial recognition technology for cows, reports
came from an earlier goal to improve commercial scale measurement. It was only after some research with sensors he discovered what could actually be achieved.
“We realised many years ago that most of the big problems in agriculture can be boiled down to a lack of commercial scale measurement,” says David.
“If you can’t accurately measure something, then you can’t improve it. So we then went to see what would be the cheapest way to provide commercial scale measurement for agricultural fields, which turned out to be imaging sensors. “Facial ID using those imag- ing sensors was a difficult next step to make the technology applicable to dairies.”
But what has the future got in store for the applications of sensors and new technology in agriculture? David sees robotics as a solution to a decreasing labour force.
“The combination of advanced sensor data and analytics to interpret them will create a platform capable of making constant small interventions to ensure maximum productivity,” he adds.
“The amount of interven- tions required combined with the cost of human labour means we are going to require low cost, robust farm robots to provide these interventions.
“So if we want to make best use of what is currently going on with sensors and analytics, then we must use robots. So I suppose I personally see them as an inevitability given the current road agriculture as an industry is on.”
Technologies are being developed at a fast pace, maybe even faster than farmers can embrace them. But David says farmers are excited about new technology. “I think farmers are sceptical of new technology because of the amount of snake oil out there, like NDVI based crop analytics, rather than pace of development,” says David.
“I’ve yet to meet a farmer who isn’t excited to use a new technology that demonstrably works. Most farmers I know are extremely progressive.
“If a technology is a good technology, then it should be cheaper and easier to use than what it’s replacing as well as being better,” he said.