TECHNOLOGY

This month’s VAS DC305 tip is a tool you can use to help monitor protocol compliance and analyze disease incidence and reproduction.

I am happy to now be providing a Valley Agricultural Software DairyComp 305 tip each month. It will usually be something more advanced in DC305 that is beneficial for monitoring and managing your dairy herd, but not necessarily something everyone may be familiar with.

While the refractometer only started gaining popularity in the dairy industry in recent years, the technology itself dates back to 1869. It has been used since in chemistry and food sciences to analyze solutions and purity of substances.

There isn’t anything much scarier for the bookkeeper of the farm than having the farm computer crash. Just ask my husband and me; ours crashed a couple of years ago.

Dairy farmers have a vast array of emerging technological tools in their arsenal.

Automatic milking systems have been around for some time now. In Canada, their number continues to increase, with different companies now operating in the market. This is an exciting technology, more and more accurate and reliable, but it brings with it some new and interesting challenges.