John Deere and DeLaval have launched the Milk Sustainability Center, a digital ecosystem that integrates agronomic and animal performance into one unified platform.
Dairy farmers can use the Milk Sustainability Center to monitor nutrient use efficiency (NUE) and carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) across their farm, herd and fields. It collects animal and agronomic data, providing insights to help farmers manage nutrient utilization effectively and reduce the need for manual data input.
“The Milk Sustainability Center is designed with input from dairy farmers to help them increase their productivity and efficiency and enable them to address the needs of dairy processors, retailers, and consumers,” says Dave Chipak, director product management at John Deere. “Integration of agronomic and animal performance data will give farmers the future ability to benchmark the data and utilize recommendations to make real-time changes that provide for an increase in productivity and a reduction in CO2e emissions.”
The Milk Sustainability Center is currently available at no cost to an initial group of dairy farmers in the United States, Netherlands and Germany, with plans to expand to other countries.
Developed and powered by Dairy Data Warehouse BV (DDW), a Dutch company with 11 years of experience in providing data solutions for dairy farming, the Milk Sustainability Center will serve dairy farmers by integrating their machinery, milking equipment, and herd management software solutions into one platform to reduce the need for manual entry. The cloud-based platform integrates the agronomic data from the John Deere Operations Center and the animal data from the DeLaval system, allowing consultants such as nutritionists and agronomists to provide more wholistic recommendations to the farmer.
Lars Bergmann, executive vice president of digital service at DeLaval, says, “Dairy farming involves using multiple unconnected software solutions. The Milk Sustainability Center links these different systems into one platform. This integration reduces the need for manual data entry and provides farmers with a comprehensive view of their farms’ sustainability. The tool helps identify where farmers can save money and improve their sustainability efforts by highlighting nutrient losses and offering recommendations for reduction.”
