Health-tracking collars for cows are proving to be a valuable innovation. “The devices monitor each animal’s activity and rumination—a measure of digestion—and automatically flag abnormalities, helping farmers keep their herds healthy,” reports The Doomslayer. They also allow dairy farms to operate with fewer employees in a time of labor shortages. Annie Vannurden, general manager of Warner Dairy in South Dakota, purchased health-tracking collars last year and used them to expand her dairy to 5,000 cows from 2,700 without adding any employees.
The New York Times reports:
The cow at the edge of Tony Louters’s dairy farm in Merced, Calif., held 11 gallons of milk and a secret: In the next 48 hours, she would become sick.
On many farms, the health signs would have gone undetected, costing hundreds of dollars in lost milk. But thanks to a high-tech collar that each of Mr. Louters’s 700 cows wears around its neck — fitted with movement sensors and Wi-Fi — he learned the cow’s diagnosis at 5:30 a.m. when his computer pinged with an alert about its biometric data…
The devices are part of an industry known as precision farming, a data-driven approach for optimizing production that is booming with the addition of A.I. and other technologies. Last year, the livestock-monitoring industry alone was valued at more than $5 billion…
Farmers have long used technology to collect and analyze data, with the origins of precision farming dating to the 1990s. In the early 2000s, satellite imagery changed the way farmers determined crop schedules, as did drones and eventually sensors in the fields. Nowadays, if you drive by farms in places like California’s Central Valley, you may not see any humans at all…
The new products are helping farmers reduce costs as tariffs and inflation raise the prices of farm equipment and feed. They also allow farmers to do more work with fewer people as the Trump administration cracks down on illegal immigration.
Farmers will need to work with fewer people due to immigrant farm workers being deported or leaving the country. Fortune reports that
The Trump administration quietly issued a dire warning about the president’s immigration crackdown, admitting that it risks food shortages and that American workers will not step up to fill labor needs.
The startling acknowledgment was buried in an Oct. 2 filing in the Federal Register to explain a new rule that would lower wages under the H-2A visa program, which allows U.S. companies to bring in foreign nationals for temporary agriculture jobs. The Labor Department said “the current and imminent labor shortage exacerbated by the near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens, increased enforcement of existing immigration law, and global competitiveness pressures described below, presents a sufficient risk of supply shock-induced food shortages to justify immediate implementation” of the rule.
It added that the lack of non-citizen workers “results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers.”
The Labor Department’s filing also admitted that Americans are not stepping up to replace non-citizen farmworkers in vacant agricultural jobs.
