The Corn Feed

In Dairy Herd Management’s e-newsletter this week, we came across a new twist on Twitter: Cows that tweet.

It’s hard to picture a dairy cow tapping away on her smartphone, but University of Waterloo researchers have designed a much savvier set-up than that, reports Canada’s Food and Farming blog. (The blog also came up with the clever “Teats and tweets” header for its post on the project.)

Dairyman Chris Vandenberg, Marcel O’Gorman of the University of Waterloo, and Ron Broglio, an English professor at Georgia Gwinnett College, gave 12 dairy cows electronic data tags that are electronically read when they are milked by a robotic milker. Tweets such as “9.2 kg of frothy deliciousness for the humans” tell followers about feeding activities, milk production and how long the cows were milked.

In the post, O’Gorman notes:

“To me, the region’s real digital entrepreneurs are its farmers, who are using GPS technology in their equipment and robots to milk their cows,” says O’Gorman. “Many people still have an image of farms as quaint, bucolic places where a farmer milks cows with a bucket, so we decided to launch this project involving cows and technology to shatter many misconceptions out there about what farmers are doing.”

From robotic milkers and tweeting cows to high-performance specialty seeds, the ag industry is on the cutting edge.