Machinery company John Deere and robotic milking innovator DeLaval have joined efforts to create the Milk Sustainability Center (MSC), a digital ecosystem to help dairy farmers improve the efficiency and sustainability of their operations. The ecosystem will be open for partners to join, with the objective of providing farmers the data needed for a holistic view of their dairy operations.
Dairy farmers will use the Milk Sustainability Center to monitor nutrient use efficiency for nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, and carbon dioxide equivalent, for their entire farm, specific fields, or their herd. The MSC will also provide data to allow dairy farmers to compare their performance to other dairy operations and identify key areas for improvement.
The MSC aims to serve dairy farmers independent of farm machinery brands and herd management software.
The MSC is cloud-based for desktop or mobile devices and is built and powered by Dairy Data Warehouse BV, a Dutch-based company in operation for the last 10 years offering data solutions for sustainable dairy. Dairy farmers, consultants, dealers, and other partners can also be invited to view their data in MSC.
“Dairy farming is perhaps the most complex agriculture business today with no system integration between crop and animal performance. Dairy farmers often use five to seven different, non-connected software solutions to run their business,” said Dave Chipak, Director, Dairy & Livestock Production Systems at John Deere. “The MSC will enable dairy farmers to calculate, benchmark, simulate, and optimize NUE and CO2e for sustainable and profitable decision-making.”
Here’s how it works: After farmer authorization, data from DeLaval Plus and the John Deere Operations Center will be automatically pulled into the Milk Sustainability Center. Manual data input will be reduced, ensuring high data quality, and ultimately helping an entire farm system — fields, cows, employees, advisors, machines, and other assets — work efficiently together.
The initial version of MSC will be released in summer 2024 in North America and selected European Union countries and will be free of charge. A premium version with extended capabilities will be released at a later date.
