How one IoT company is improving dairy production

When Alisa Gusterer tells farmers that her company’s technology can flag that their cows are getting sick before it actually happens, the most common response is happy disbelief.

But it’s not fortune-telling—it’s just science, with some help from artificial intelligence.

SmaXtec, an agtech company that offers livestock monitoring services, rolled out a new AI-based disease-detection capability in October that applies data analysis to determine which cows will develop illnesses like mastitis days before they’d show clinical signs.

“They keep saying, ‘I didn’t think that this was possible that a computer could tell me that my cow got sick before I could,’” Gusterer said of the customer response.

The enhanced disease-detection capabilities, coupled with SmaXtec’s real-time monitoring system that tracks indicators of a herd’s health and wellness, all go toward promoting a better dairy operation.

“This technology really provides that win-win-win situation, you know, where that intersection of sustainability, animal welfare, and profitability come in,” Gusterer told us. “Those don’t have to be opposing forces.”

Not a tough pill to swallow

For a cow to be brought “online,” it first has to swallow a capsule-like sensor—much like taking a pill. However, unlike a pill, the bolus won’t be digested. It settles into the bottom of a cow’s reticulum, and beams health data to a mobile base station that is connected to AT&T’s network, which in turn transmits it to SmaXtec’s cloud server for analysis.

Farmers can access the data on SmaXtec’s computer interface and mobile app, adjusting a cow’s care plan based on the results, ideally preempting the need for antibiotics or other forms of medical intervention.

“We can catch these diseases three to four days before that cow shows clinical signs and really just help her feel better,” Gusterer said. “Much like us humans would stay hydrated, maybe take an Advil and continue to go about our day, we’re helping these cows, you know, just be a cow.”

While strong internet connections can still be scarce in rural areas, Gusterer noted that SmaXtec rarely encounters customers that don’t have enough connectivity to support the wireless data transmission. However, in those instances she said customers can use a hard-wired ethernet connection to send the data to the cloud.

“We don’t need super-high-speed connectivity to transmit that data,” she said. “​​It boils down to how quickly the farmer can then react to the alerts.”

Can ewe stomach it?

SmaXtec, now a global operation, started out as a love story. Co-founder Mario Fallast dated an agriculture student in college, and he grew frustrated with her time-consuming research project that required taking samples to check the pH levels of cows’ rumens throughout the day, Gusterer told us.

“She had to go and do this every couple of hours, which, you know, isn’t quite conducive to spending a lot of time with a partner,” Gusterer said. “That was where the idea came from, of putting a sensor inside of a cow and measuring pH. And then from there, the idea grew into measuring temperature and a lot of other parameters.”

For now, SmaXtec is focused on the dairy-cow industry, but Gusterer said the company receives frequent inquiries from sheep farmers, as well. While the devices could eventually be modified to collect data from sheep, one livestock variety is out of the question.

“Horses wouldn’t be an option, just because of the way their stomach is made up,” according to Gusterer.