The Smart Cow

When you have a glass of milk this morning, a farmer may have utilized an iPhone to monitor the quality.  Your basic dumb cow is getting smarter in real-time as big dairy enters the era of big data.  A Canadian company, Dairy Quality, recently unveiled a new product called Milk Guardian, a small black box that slides onto the back of an iPhone.  From robots to apps, the farm has become an innovation laboratory.  If you have a problem that needs to utilize a camera and software, the solution will most likely intersect with a smartphone.

A farmer inserts a plastic slide containing a milk sample from one of his cows, and the device counts the number of somatic cells (a high somatic cell count can be an indicator of mastitis, an infection of the udder tissue).  Counting somatic cells used to require sending milk to an offsite lab and waiting a week or more for results; using a microscope and an app takes six seconds or less.