Around 200 milk farmers from Indapur village, some 140km southeast of Pune in Maharashtra, and surrounding areas are sitting under a pink-and-white shamiana on a sunny afternoon in November. It is an awareness workshop on what data tracking and genomics can do for milk farming, but the buzz is more around when dairies will raise milk procurement prices.
As veterinarian Abdul Samad strides to the stage to address the gathering, some in the crowd are expecting a political speech. Samad starts by talking about stagnant milk prices but quickly segues into something else. “Stop agitating about milk prices and start focusing on improving productivity and profits. Have you ever cared for where the bull semen is coming from when you do artificial insemination for your cattle?”
The switch from politics to bull semen quality is a hard swerve and there are amused murmurs in the audience.
But reality is staring them in the face.
Milk prices in India rose three times in the decade to 2015 but have plateaued since. This has led to Indian dairies and the farmers they procure milk from looking for solutions to rein in costs and at the same time raise milk output. For a country that produces some 155 million tonnes of milk a year, the big question is how to increase the productivity of Indian cow from the current average of 1,200 litres a year to the average in countries such as the US and Israel: around 3,500 litres annually.
“Even a small shop owner keeps all the records, data. Where is your cattle data?” Samad, who retired as dean of Bombay Veterinary College in 2010, asks the farmers of Indapur.
With more than four decades of work behind him, the vet knows what he’s talking about.
In 2002, Samad, along with software engineer Prashant Murdeshwar, co-founded a company called Vetware Pvt. Ltd. It now offers a mobile-based and easy-to-use app, called Herdman, for farmers to capture cattle data using QR (quick response) codes on the front end.
That data is used to produce insights about cattle health, matching bulls to bring about genetic improvement, and even milk production forecasting. These insights are delivered in the local language to milk farmers and the vets looking after their herds.
The potential of using software and genomics is immense in India’s fragmented milk farming sector, where some 120 million farming families are engaged in cow and buffalo rearing, according to the Indian Agricultural Census. If they can double milk yield, it will have large implications for nutrition in India, milk and milk product exports, and generation of new national income that is better distributed among the country’s 700 million farmers.
The repository of information that Herdman covers includes feed data, days to puberty and calving, weight, health and disease tracking, milk yields, and quality of milk for each of some 240,000 cows and buffaloes on the software across India. Chitale Dairy from Sangli and Hatsun Agro Products in Chennai are the pioneers of adopting techniques wrapped into Herdman.
Hatsun wants to deploy the solution to over 1 million cattle in two years. Larger dairy operations such as Amul have their own tagging and data collection solutions. Read more
As veterinarian Abdul Samad strides to the stage to address the gathering, some in the crowd are expecting a political speech. Samad starts by talking about stagnant milk prices but quickly segues into something else. “Stop agitating about milk prices and start focusing on improving productivity and profits. Have you ever cared for where the bull semen is coming from when you do artificial insemination for your cattle?”
The switch from politics to bull semen quality is a hard swerve and there are amused murmurs in the audience.
But reality is staring them in the face.
Milk prices in India rose three times in the decade to 2015 but have plateaued since. This has led to Indian dairies and the farmers they procure milk from looking for solutions to rein in costs and at the same time raise milk output. For a country that produces some 155 million tonnes of milk a year, the big question is how to increase the productivity of Indian cow from the current average of 1,200 litres a year to the average in countries such as the US and Israel: around 3,500 litres annually.
“Even a small shop owner keeps all the records, data. Where is your cattle data?” Samad, who retired as dean of Bombay Veterinary College in 2010, asks the farmers of Indapur.
With more than four decades of work behind him, the vet knows what he’s talking about.
In 2002, Samad, along with software engineer Prashant Murdeshwar, co-founded a company called Vetware Pvt. Ltd. It now offers a mobile-based and easy-to-use app, called Herdman, for farmers to capture cattle data using QR (quick response) codes on the front end.
That data is used to produce insights about cattle health, matching bulls to bring about genetic improvement, and even milk production forecasting. These insights are delivered in the local language to milk farmers and the vets looking after their herds.
The potential of using software and genomics is immense in India’s fragmented milk farming sector, where some 120 million farming families are engaged in cow and buffalo rearing, according to the Indian Agricultural Census. If they can double milk yield, it will have large implications for nutrition in India, milk and milk product exports, and generation of new national income that is better distributed among the country’s 700 million farmers.
The repository of information that Herdman covers includes feed data, days to puberty and calving, weight, health and disease tracking, milk yields, and quality of milk for each of some 240,000 cows and buffaloes on the software across India. Chitale Dairy from Sangli and Hatsun Agro Products in Chennai are the pioneers of adopting techniques wrapped into Herdman.
Hatsun wants to deploy the solution to over 1 million cattle in two years. Larger dairy operations such as Amul have their own tagging and data collection solutions. Read more