Project title: “Decision making using DAIRI (Data Automation Interface and Real-Time Interaction): a platform for connecting farmers to their data”
Funding began July 2021
Austin Polebitski
Associate Professor | Civil and Environmental Engineering
UW–Platteville
The dairy community is undergoing rapid growth and change in data management and analytics. With sensing becoming increasingly accessible and inexpensive, dairies are finding new ways to optimize feed, milk production and bovine health that were not possible less than a decade ago.
More technology means more data generated from different sources. This project is focused on understanding how farmers currently use their data to make decisions and analyzing how a decision support framework could influence daily operations to increase herd health and revenue. To accomplish this, a light and efficient web-based platform was developed based on discussion with partner farmers and their consultants.
In addition to faculty, the research team includes local farmers and nutritionists to guide platform development and focus on ease of use, essentially getting data to a place where it is more easily stored, analyzed, and used to make decisions about farm management.
This project consists of four phases: farmer engagement to understand current use of on-farm data and the collection of historical data, creation of the DAIRI farmer platform, use of DAIRI in daily operations and decision making, and comparative analysis of important metrics related to herd health and revenue.
The expected outcome of this project is to have farmers more engaged with their data and to provide undergraduate researchers with a real-life project with tangible outcomes. Day-to-day operations of farms are complicated, time consuming, and hands-on, with many decisions having to made daily that could impact revenue or herd health over the next week or longer.
DAIRI provides near real time assistance with decision making as feed adjustments, grouping strategies, lactation rotations, and health of each animal can be tracked and visualized, providing a single-point shared resource that the farmer can discuss with nutritionists, feed consultants, and farm technicians, keeping all eyes focused on the same data and situation.
Findings
Austin Polebitski’s Hub-funded project “Decision making using DAIRI: a platform for connecting farmers to their data” was developed in partnership with Arghya Das, former faculty at UW–Platteville and current assistant professor of computer science at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
UW–Platteville data science students Nolan James and Adam Welch were student researchers on the project. Polebitski is consulting with WiSys for patent opportunities, and the platform is currently being tested by farmers.
Learn more about DAIRI at dairionline.com
Read more about those involved in this work:
STUDENT PERSPECTIVE
Nolan James
BUSINESS PERSPECTIVE
Big data made easy: Dairy nutritionist sparks idea for data platform