"Boring" Technology Will Reshape Dairy Over the Next 10 Years
Do you remember the last time a technology excited you? Excited you so much you gaped your mouth in astonishment? For me, this happened when I first drove a car with adaptive cruise control, typed a question into Chat GPT, and streamed a movie on my TV. However, as time wore on, these all became common day experiences. This is the curse of technology. It becomes boring very quickly. Is this bad? In my eyes, boring technology is good technology. Once a technology becomes a boring experience it means it has become proven, well-adopted, and easy to utilize. As I see it, there are three boring technologies silently shaping the industry – sort gates, forage harvesters, and mechanical ventilation.
Sort Gates
Sort gates are not new, not sexy, and not exciting. However, there are very few new dairies built without sort gates as part of the cattle management system. Sort gates have the amazing capability to bring cows to you. Sort gates bring cows to the herd manager versus the herd manager finding the cows. With this, a single herd manager can exponentially increase his productivity with less time walking finding cows, and more time treating, breeding, or checking cows. Sort gates have become far more efficient and dependable and have allowed for the scalability of cow management.
Forage Harvesters
Self-propelled forage harvesters are not new, not sexy, and not exciting. Well, maybe a little sexy. As a nutritionist, it is my job to annoyingly remind my clients of the importance and impact of forage quality. In the pursuit of high-quality forage, nothing has been as impactful as large, self-propelled choppers. With forage, timing is everything. Big choppers have increased the capacity and speed at which we can execute forage harvesting. This allows us to sneak between rain windows, catch drying corn silage, and build and seal forage piles quickly. Dairies would not be nearly as productive, healthy, or large without these machines.
Ventilation
Mechanical ventilation is not new, not sexy, and not exciting. By mechanical ventilation, I am referring to cross-ventilated or tunnel-ventilated dairy barns. Anywhere you go around the world, these structures are popping up. Once just thought to be a tool for cow cooling or air quality, mechanical ventilation has changed the way we build and manage dairies. Mechanical ventilation has assisted in cow cooling and comfort in many climates. These ventilation systems allow for barns to become larger and concentrate cows closer to parlors. This, in turn, has allowed for easier cow movements, lower construction costs, and improved cow performance.
As we look forward to the next 10 years in the dairy industry, it is not the new, sexy, and exciting technology that will reshape how we do things. It will be the old, ugly, boring technology that allows us to work more efficiently, increase our cow performance, and scale our businesses.
