Global magazine Future Farming reports on the talk that CEO at Connecterra Yasir Khokhar gave at the 2018 Global Future Farming Summit in Wageningen, the Netherlands.
“The limits of mechanised farming have been reached. But has the farmer changed?,” he asked the audience. Worldwide, there are roughly 1.0 billion people involved in dairy farming, Khokhar stated. “But 80% of them are small-scale farmers. Do they care about technology?”
So, his company turns things around: instead of the farmer learning from technology and data, they let technology learn from the farmer. Connecterra developed Ida, a user-friendly app that functions as the farmer’s assistant. It uses Artificial Intelligence to detect cow behaviour pertaining to health, fertility, feeding, heat-stress and more.
The longer Ida is used on the farm, the more it learns. It will learn the behaviour of cows, the farmer’s daily operations, and then use that data to provide tailored recommendations. Khokhar emphasized that Ida itself is data-less. “Data is useless for the farmer. What a farmer needs, is advice. Ida makes the farmer better at what he does.”
