Recent technological advances can be a real support to UK dairy producers – but farmers need to be sure that the systems they are investing in are the right ones for their businesses.
This was a running theme through the presentations on the Innovation Hub at Dairy Tech 2026, held at Stoneleigh Park, in Warwickshire on 4 February, and a primary focus for speakers in the Technology to Support Herd Health presentation.
Effectiveness and reliability
Sarah Bolt, Technical Knowledge Exchange Manager at Kingshay, used Tried and Tested reports to reveal the technologies being used in the dairy sector and what farmers wanted from them. Neck collars were the most popular wearable monitors, followed by ear tags, leg monitors, bolus systems and tail sensors.
Effectiveness and reliability were the most important factors in choosing systems, she reported, along with customer support and aftersales service. “Farmers really prioritise trustworthy suppliers and dependable products and support rather than simply opting for the cheapest option,” she explained.
She added that wearables could enhance productivity and efficiency and farmers had rated heat detection sensors as the most improved on farm. Fertility rates and labour-saving technologies had shown moderate improvement, but only small improvements were seen on vet costs and mastitis management, with none noticeable on milk yield, lameness or calving difficulties.
“I know people talk about AI all the time, but if we can get good data going into farm systems it’s going to become really powerful.”
Vet Will Tulley
Promoting the use of smart sensors, Robert Morrison, Head of Farms at the UK Agri-Tech Centre, said that the gold standard for any technology was the farmer themselves, and that sensors could not adapt, reason or do anything better than a farmer. However, the use of sensors are key to offering an early warning system, rather than waiting for symptoms to appear, and that as the number of farms decline, and herds increase in size, technology would increasingly play a key role.
He advised farmers to identify specific tasks they needed help with and to pick the technology most suited to those, and to ensure that data was transferable across platforms.
Testing equipment
Dr Amy Kirby, Vice President of Customer and Strategy at Untap Health, described her company’s testing equipment, which can be installed in slurry or trough water to detect infections up to 10 days before symptoms present and monitor progress to tell whether interventions are successful.
Robert Kirk, County Sales Manager of Smaxtec, discussed another smart sensor – a bolus that constantly delivers data from the cow’s reticulum to a digital assistant that allows farmers to constantly monitor herd health and receive alerts via their PC or smartphone.
As part of the afternoon session, UK Agri Tech Centre used its time to outline funding opportunities available to farmers, highlighting the ADOPT grant that supports farmer-led, on-farm trials to develop new solutions to farming challenges.
Global dairy innovation panel
Learning from how others are tackling the big issues was the central talking point of the ‘Global dairy innovation’ panel, which invited academics and innovators from Canada to share their insights from across the Atlantic.
Improved feed efficiency, disease prevention and supply chain communication are just a handful of benefits of implementing a ‘smart farm’ model, Dr Patience Palmer argued. She said smart cameras and weighing equipment are helping Canadian farmers to personalise diets and diagnose illness in animals before symptoms show. Ensuring the entire supply chain, from farmer to retailer, is connected via a management tool or app could also help reduce time from farm to fork.
However, while the panel agreed that a more technologically integrated supply chain is the way forward for the industry, solutions of this kind must be developed with consideration for the end user, the farmer.
The overcomplication of tech by developers was a key concern of Professor Suresh Raja Neethirajan, who specialises in Digital Livestock Farming at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. Simplifying software and “closing the gap between the data and the farmer” would help streamline the on-farm decision-making process for farmers, he insisted.
To tackle the challenges around labour management and retention, farmers will need to look to AI for solutions; this is according to Ester DeGroot, director of operations at CATTLEytics. The farm management system that provides support with animal health reporting and workflow management, also has an AI feature that helps farmers digest their data. Eliminating surprises on farm, Ms DeGroot said, was key to keeping staff onside and reduced the chance of wires getting crossed.
“Cows are going to be able to produce significantly more milk, it’s almost inevitable,” vet Will Tulley told a session scanning the future of nutrition.
He said that “huge” genetic advances would boost milk productivity in the next 25 years – at least in theory – but that cows’ ability to take on dry matter may not keep pace with that potential.
While there was still some headroom in conventional feeding strategies, particularly around feed and forage quality, he pointed to next generation diet supplementation as the key to cashing in on the dairy cows of the future.
“We are going to have to do something different,” he said.
“We are going to have to use some more targeted amino acids, specific fatty acids and some things that enhance the digestion of feeds to get more nutrients into each mouthful.”
Return on investment crucial
The problem is that these products are likely to come at a cost.
With market volatility the only certainty, Will said that meant a demonstrable return on investment for the extra nutritional outlay would be crucial.
That meant cutting through the increasing cloud of data at the progressive end of dairy farming to return actionable insights.
Will, who later said his number one investment would be well-maintained weighing plates, said the outputs from robotic milking, wearable tech and camera-based systems was sometimes falling short.
Some investments were only “driving decisions at the individual cow level; which cow is sick and which needs to be served today”, he said, rather than providing the overview that might inform a feeding strategy.
Dairy data to be ‘revolutionised’
Meanwhile, concentrating too much on herd averages – an increasing feature with larger headcounts – risked overlooking the outliers that should inform breeding and culling decisions.
“That classic bell-shaped curve rarely applies to dairy herds”, Will noted.
Striking the balance, measuring the right things and crunching the numbers was time-consuming.
Fortunately, Will said dairy data was “about to be revolutionised”.
“I know people talk about AI all the time, but if we can get good data going into farm systems it’s going to become really powerful. For example, in big herds we can move from looking at group solutions based on averages, to optimum solutions for all individual animals based on their individual performance versus where they should be.”
Will said this opened up the prospect of “precision nutrition”.
“Then we can provide those higher value, high-cost nutrients to the animals that need it the most, based on their individual dry matter intake and individual outputs, really driving the return on investment for the farmer and herd.”
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