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Business News/ Industry / Infotech/  Chitale Dairy takes cows to cloud, IoT
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Chitale Dairy takes cows to cloud, IoT

Using RFID tags, and cellphones to track the health and nutrition of cattle has markedly raised the animals' productivity

At Chitale Dairy, equipment like evaporators, spray dryers, pasteurizers, boilers, chillers, refrigerators and packaging machines are automated by Rockwell Automation, an industry automation solutions provider. Premium
At Chitale Dairy, equipment like evaporators, spray dryers, pasteurizers, boilers, chillers, refrigerators and packaging machines are automated by Rockwell Automation, an industry automation solutions provider.

Mumbai: The 12 cows and eight calves that Sachin Wagh, a 30-year-old farmer from Sangli district in Maharashtra, owns look no different from the hundreds of other cows that provide milk to countless dairies across the country.

But a closer look shows that all the 20 cows are tagged with radio frequency identification (RFID) labels on each ear which, when scanned by an RFID reader, transmit information about each one of them back to the data centre at Chitale Dairy where Wagh has been supplying milk for the last eight years.

Chitale Dairy captures details such as the age and name of the cows, and the amount of milk they produce. It then sends Wagh periodic text messages (in Marathi) that alert him to any specific need about individual cows. “A cow, for instance, may be in poor health, may need supplements, or may be due to deliver a calf. SMSes are sent both to me and the veterinarian for action, as and when required," he said.

Wagh is one of the 50,000 such farmers who supply a total of about 600,000 litres of milk daily to Chitale Dairy, which was founded about 75 years back in Bhilawadi, a small town in Sangli.

While Chitale Dairy has been using RFID tags for over a decade to track cows and buffaloes, it also began transmitting the data to improve the productivity of its business, efficiency of the farmers, and milk yield of the cattle over the last couple of years.

Vishvas Chitale, director of Chitale Dairy and a third-generation entrepreneur, likes to label the journey as “cows to cloud and IoT (Internet of Things)" since the data is transmitted over the cloud (metaphor for delivery of software and services over a network, primarily the Internet) and can be accessed on desktops, while the factory data from the multiple sensors help in “plant automation" and analytics.

“India is the world’s largest producer of milk. But the yield of milk per animal is much lower compared with that in the US, for example. As one of the country’s leading dairy farms, we strive to deliver a variety of dairy products by adopting the latest technologies to positively impact the community we work with. This also differentiates us in the dairy market and our other business initiatives connected with the dairy farm," said Chitale.

A system that combines passive RFID tags, which are washable too, and cellphones to record and track the health and nutrition of cows and water buffaloes on Indian farms has “significantly increased its animals’ health and productivity", according to Chitale whose dairy now stores information about the visits and the services administered, or the observations made during those visits such as vaccinations, calf delivery, medications or simply the volume of milk produced by a particular cow.

At Chitale Dairy, equipment like evaporators, spray dryers, pasteurizers, boilers, chillers, refrigerators and packaging machines are automated by Rockwell Automation, an industry automation solutions provider. For example, if a pasteurizer on the factory premises malfunctions, the supervisor concerned is immediately alerted about this on his desktop or mobile device. A Web-enabled software, similarly, gives remote access to an energy management system on the factory floor with appropriate security controls.

VMware Inc. has helped Chitale Dairy consolidate its two separate data centres since the dairy faced operational challenges with 10 physical servers spread across two data centres in a town 500km from the nearest city. By consolidating the two physical operations into one virtual data centre—a process called virtualization—on servers from technology company Dell Inc., Chitale Dairy reduced its server hardware and software acquisition costs, besides lowering power consumption.

“The VMware vCloud Suite supports our vision by helping us manage our critical operations—not only at the dairy farm, but across businesses. Our VMware cloud infrastructure has enabled us to leverage technology to work better with our community of farmers," said Chitale.

The dairy, then, had to upgrade its network with help from Dell to support the internal cloud used for the data management needs of its research farm, the monitoring of logistical efficiency and factory energy consumption, and the storage and delivery of unique animal data. “This also helped in eliminating delays that impede our daily delivery schedule for fresh milk products," he added.

Chitale Dairy also has a pathological laboratory that helps in early detection of pregnancies, diagnosis, prevention and control of diseases in animals. In addition, there is a frozen semen lab that has carried out over 18,000 artificial inseminations, “with a success rate of nearly 35%".

“Genetic records spanning over 10 generations of chosen breeds have been maintained as a definitive knowledge base to drive further research strategy," Chitale said, adding, “We eventually hope to put up this genetic data on the cloud and make it available to veterinarians and farmers."

According to Gaurav Chand, vice-president (marketing enterprise solutions) at Dell, “The case of Chitale Dairy is one where technology priorities are synced to business priorities. Chitale Dairy uses technology across social (has a Facebook presence), mobility, analytics and cloud, and needed to work with a solutions provider and not just a product vendor. Chitale Dairy is a fine example of Dell’s future-ready enterprise, built on Dell’s future-ready IT foundation and an agile infrastructure that can bridge the gap between traditional and new IT paradigms."

The Indian diary industry is largely fragmented and presents unique challenges in terms of procurement as well as distribution.

According to a report by International Data Corp., commissioned by VMware, customers in India are expected to save an estimated $4 billion (around 25,560 crore today) between 2014 and 2020 by adopting a software-defined approach to managing IT. The figures reflect operational costs associated with power consumption, cooling, real estate and server administration.

For instance, dairies such as Kwality Ltd and Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd (GCMMF), which owns the Amul brand, already use technology to automate their systems and analytics to improve the yield of milk.

Kwality, for instance, selected a cloud computing solution from International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) to improve its operational efficiency and productivity by integrating data from legacy systems. The IBM SmartCloud SAP Express Dairy Solution was aimed at helping Kwality Dairy build a more robust, integrated operations system, and address challenges like milk procurement and payment, production, and fat and SNF (solid not fat) accounting.

Similar is the case with GCMMF where IBM implemented a SAP ERP (enterprise resource planning) system on its technology platform, besides building a data centre backed by a disaster recovery centre—all aimed at enabling Amul to increase its operational efficiencies and supply chain.

Farmers are seeing tangible benefits from the use of technology in these dairies. For Wagh, the verdict is clear: “Not only do I get up-to-date information from the dairy about the health of my cows, but they give more milk too. Earlier I used to get around 12 litres of milk per cow. Today, each cow gives me 30-35 litres."

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leslie D'Monte
Leslie D'Monte specialises in technology and science writing. He is passionate about digital transformation and deeptech topics including artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, crypto, metaverses, quantum computing, genetics, fintech, electric vehicles, solar power and autonomous vehicles. Leslie is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Knight Science Journalism Fellow (2010-11), author of 'AI Rising: India's Artificial Intelligence Growth Story', co-host of the 'AI Rising' podcast, and runs the 'Tech Talk' newsletter. In his other avatar, he curates tech events and moderates panels.
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Published: 30 Jul 2015, 01:15 AM IST
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