NORTH HAVERHILL — The Grafton County Farm is among three publicly owned farms around the state now using a new technology to better understand and manage dairy herds.
A project of the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension, the technology uses various sensors inside pills, or “boluses.” Once, swallowed the sensors measure the cows’ temperature and movement.
The data from the temperature and movement sensors can be correlated to show how much each cow is moving, drinking and eating — and the cows’ digestive health. They can also alert farmers as to when a cow might be sick or is in heat.
“Cows are like dogs,” Sarah Allen, a dairy production specialist with the Cooperative Extension, said in a Friday phone interview. “They can’t exactly tell us what’s going on with them, but these give us an insight to have a computer tell us what’s going on with them.”
To communicate the sensors’ readings, the boluses send a non-harmful, low-frequency signal to nearby antennas installed at farms, according to the website of smaXtec, the creator of the bolus system.
From the antennas, the data is then sent to smaXtec’s cloud for algorithmic and artificial intelligence analysis — relaying the results to farmers’ personal devices, according to the Austrian herd-monitoring tech company.
The project is funded through an $83,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture equipment grant, which covers the cost of the boluses and base stations/antennas.
The grant covered installation at the three farms, the other two being UNH’s dairy operations: Fairchild Dairy Teaching and Research Center in Durham and the UNH Organic Dairy Farm in Lee.
Each individual pill costs $39 and is guaranteed for the lifetime of the cow, UNH Assistant Professor of Precision Dairy Management Claira Seely, who wrote the grant, said in an email.
The grant also covers two years of “replacement animals,” or young cows that will mature and join the milking herd in future years, Seely said.
Out of the around 150 total Holstein and Jersey at the Grafton County Farm in North Haverhill, 106 were mature enough to swallow the roughly 2-inch pills beginning on Nov. 1, Grafton County Farm herdsman Ben White said.
The pills will remain in one of their four stomach chambers for life. They are harmless to cows and are neither regurgitated nor digested, according to smaXtec’s website.
Farmers can use information gathered by the sensors to act earlier than they might have otherwise to improve the animals’ health. In North Haverhill, the sensors have already started providing information.
“I can see a lot of things,” said White. “And sometimes I pick it up before the bolus would pick it up, or sometimes the bolus will give me a little bit of a heads up before I see it.”
“I’m not super set on having computers run everything,” said White, who has been dairy farming for nearly all of his 52-year life. “But it’s like another set of eyes.”
The last county dairy farm in the Granite State, the Grafton County Farm started in the 19th century and largely relies on labor from people incarcerated at the neighboring County Department of Corrections. Through work on the farm, incarcerated people can reduce their sentences and get experience in dairy, pig, tree and fruit and vegetable farming.
As many dairy farms continue struggling to stay afloat in an increasingly difficult market, new technology like this can increase efficiency, the researchers said.
“A lot of farms are looking at how to improve their management, reduce feed costs, labor costs, things like that, in order to stay in business,” Allen said.
As more farms implement the technology, researchers will have more information about trends and herd management practices.
Although smaXtec’s cow-monitoring has been available for a few years in the U.S., a barrier for many farms has been the cost of the system, Allen said.
However, as the system becomes more accessible in terms of cost, every farm will eventually have to have the technology “in order to make it because they just make you more efficient,” Allen said.
Still, there is some apprehension from longtime dairy farmers.
“I like doing things the old school way,” said White. “But in a way, something like this with the boluses and stuff, it’s just another tool that I can use.”
