![]() His herd's "to be inseminated" count is at zero, as signified by a reassuring green check mark.Īt 6-foot-4, with combine-wide shoulders and a Kiwi accent, the New Zealand-born Watson, 46, looks like a rugby player - which he was, playing a linebacker-like position in the late "90s for a semi-professional team called the Hurricanes. The AI says he has three "potential health problems to be checked" among his herd: Cow #14433 is eating less, while cows #10172 and #3522 are "ruminating" or chewing less, a sign they might feel ill. Standing one March morning among his cows at Seven Oaks Dairy, one of three farms he runs as part of his Hart Agriculture brand, Watson pulls out his iPhone to show off his Ida app. Google has joined other tech giants in pushing forcefully into AI, with chief executive Sundar Pichai telling a town-hall crowd in January that AI "is one of the most important things humanity is working on" and "more profound than electricity or fire." (He did not explicitly mention cows.) That release sparked a major wave of AI development, giving start-ups a shortcut to calculating advanced mathematics and creating learning machines. #SOUNDS LIKE A JOB FOR SUPERCOW DRIVERS#And while truck drivers and cashiers see AI as a job-killing omen, the farmers say they're in a labor crunch from years of too few young people getting into farming and need all the help they can get.Ĭonnecterra, a development team based in the Netherlands, built Ida with help from TensorFlow, the giant AI toolbox that Google created for its own apps and opened to the public in 2015. The Ida AI has sparked some early interest among farmers eager to compete in an industry in which low milk prices and farm layoffs have everyone on edge. Those "real-time cattle analytics' are then used by the AI to assess diet and movement and predict concerning health issues, such as lameness or udder infections.Īs silly as this intricate level of maximum optimization sounds, particularly for a herd of cows that spend much of the day staring blankly or relieving themselves, Watson said it could mean the difference between a cow's healthy milking or premature death - and the difference between making or losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. The AI that Watson's farm uses - called Ida, for "The Intelligent Dairy Farmer's Assistant" - tracks his cows' tiniest movements through their collars and then graphs and dissects them en masse. That down-home resistance raises a question farmers might be tackling before much of the rest of the workforce: Can new technology ever beat old intuition - even when it comes to a bunch of cows? #SOUNDS LIKE A JOB FOR SUPERCOW SOFTWARE#Sophisticated AI technologies are helping reinvent how Americans work, offering powerful software that can read and react to mountains of data and save them time and stress along the way.īut its rollout is also sparking tensions in workplaces as humble and old-fashioned as the dairy farm. "The good Lord said, "This is what you can do." I can't draw, paint or anything else, but I can watch cows." "I can spot a cow across a room that don't feel great just by looking in her eyes," said Mark Rodgers, a fourth-generation dairy farmer in Dearing, Georgia, whose dad still drives a tractor at 82. When a cow's in heat, they know she'll start getting mounted by her bovine sisters, so they smear paint on the cows' backsides and then just look for the incriminating smudge. "There may be 10 animals out there that have a real problem, but could you pick them?" he said one morning, standing among a grazing herd of dairy cattle wearing what he calls "cow Fitbits."īut on the neighboring pastures here in rural Georgia, other farmers say they aren't that impressed. WAYNESBORO - In the two months since Richard Watson strapped 200 remote-control-sized transmitters around his cows' necks, an artificial-intelligence system named Ida has pinged his phone with helpful alerts: when his cows are chewing the cud, when they're feeling sick, when they're ready for insemination. ![]()
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