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Dairy data from multiple programs part of UW study

Farmers use data to better manage their farms, but a Wisconsin farmer is working with researchers to make better use of that data.  Brownfield’s Larry Lee has more from World Dairy Expo.

Mitch Breunig owns Mystic Valley Farms near Sauk City, Wisconsin.  He’s also the current President of the Professional Dairy Producers.  Breunig milks 450 cows using a double 14 parlor system.  He tells Brownfield he uses eight different software products to collect or manage everything from rumen function to bookkeeping, but they don’t work together.  “We have all of the data. It’s all there.  If we can dump it into a format that’s usable across farms.”

Breunig is working with University of Wisconsin researchers to get that data into one place so producers can make management decisions with less time crunching the numbers.  “Heather White and Victor Cabrera at the University of Wisconsin wrote a grant with USDA, I think it was USDA, to sort of tackle this project and so I wrote them a letter of recommendation kind of explaining the things we’re doing on our farm, so our farm and Larsen Acres from Evansville are the two farms that they’re working with so right now, they’re downloading our data from a couple of our programs on a daily basis and looking at it.”

The university is studying ways to bring these technologies together, and the private sector is also developing solutions.  One company called My Dairy Dashboard launched their data management tool this week.