Palms used to keep track of livestock
Palms used to keep track of livestock
A farm full of cows, pigs, sheep and other creatures that like to roll around in the muck is not the ideal environment you would imagine for using a Palm handheld, but it is proving to be very useful for improving profitability for farmers.
For a dairy cow, information about basic degrees, such as sire, dam and grand parentage details; health history; mating information; and even milk-production measurements.
For many years, farmers have had to rely on information documented by paper and pen and then had to enter the information manually into a desktop computer at the end of the day.
This led to inaccuracies and meant farmers had to spent a lot of their time behind computers at the end of the day.
D&K Technology, however, has developed FarmHand, which is a Palm handheld system that is being used by more than 20 Australian herd owners to record information about more than 8,000 cattle.
Darren VanLiessum, a partner of D&K Technology and a dairy cattle sharefarmer talked about some of the uses. "If I notice a cow on heat in the paddock, I simply make a note in my Palm handheld, and then when the cow arrives for milking that evening, it is identified, separated, breed checked, parentage checked and then artificially inseminated.
"The ability to access information using FarmHand on the Palm handheld means that on-the-spot or remote decisions can be made for treatment of various disorders, or to avoid possible doubling-up on previous treatments."
"This helps to maintain quality control and prevent over-dosing of animals, and results in reduction of costs."
Farmers use the technology to make notes on the go and RFID technology is even being used now in the ear of animals, providing each animal with an individual identity.
This means that when a cow arrives for milking, its history can be automatically displayed on the FarmHand via the RFID tag.
There are plans to keep pushing the barriers of the technology in Australia too, which includes developing a Bluetooth-enabled solution to allow the sharing of data in the dairy.
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