Input Stories

Cows are getting smarter—sort of (The Wall Street Journal, subscription).

What’s going on: “Dairy farmers across the country are turning to internet-connected ‘smart’ collars, ear and leg tags to track the specific movements and patterns of their cows” to better manage each animal as herds grow to accommodate increasing U.S. dairy demand.

• The wearables are also helping detect pattern irregularities that could indicate disease, such as the H5N1 avian influenza, which has killed millions of chickens in the U.S. in the past few years and spread to cows. A second strain of the virus, D1.1, recently spread from poultry to cows in Nevada.

What it means: “The use of these internet-connected monitoring devices represents the growth of so-called precision technologies in farming.”

• Adoption among dairy farmers has not happened as quickly due to many dairy farms’ “far-flung” locations and lack of reliable internet access, a requirement for the smart devices.

A growing market: “Merck Animal Health, a division of the U.S.-based biopharmaceutical giant Merck formed in 1948, said nearly 2 million of the country’s dairy cows are being monitored using its hardware and algorithms.”

• Merck Animal Health makes internet-connected cow collars and ear tags and offers dairies subscriptions to its cattle-monitoring platform, SenseHub.
• The livestock monitoring market is slated to reach $1.65 billion this year and is expanding at a compounded annual growth rate of 7.7%. Its expected revenue by 2031: $2.57 billion.