Milking Technology
BHILAWADI - Don’t ask the farmer at Bhilawadi village in Maharashtra’s Sangli district what he’s doing with a personal digital assistant (PDA). You may get booed and even ‘mooed’ at the ignorance.
28 August 2007
2 minute read
“We use the DeLaval equipment in our farm. But for our suppliers we have used the Bombay Veterinary Hospital’s RFID technology.”
Vishwas Chitale, partner at Chitale Dairy
Unlike in cities where the young and hip use the handheld device as a fashion statement, the farmer in Bhilawadi uses a more complex form of the same machine as a productivity enhancement tool for his dairy and cattle farming business. What’s more, radio frequency identification (RFID) chips help him attain efficiencies through proper inventory tracking and management of cows and their yield.
Technology-use has got a completely different dimension in this village. Explains Vishwas Chitale, partner at Chitale Dairy: “We couldn’t have done it on our own. So, we herded up.” When an entire village’s cattle population is taken collectively, it makes sense for a para veterinarian to obtain information through RFID tags that help record everything from milk yield, health parameters to feed data of this herd. For a chip to work, it can be fixed to an animal’s ear. The RFID tag can be read only when a pocket PC or PDA is close to it and that prevents any kind of tampering of data, he explains.
The modern dairy has achieved considerable success with the use of active RFID tags. For its own buffalo farm, the dairy has used DeLaval’s software DelPro. Says Chitale, “We use the DeLaval equipment in our farm. But for our suppliers we have used the Bombay Veterinary Hospital’s RFID technology.” The technology apparently won the first prize from the World Bank in a competition two years ago.
