Emerging technologies are knocking on the doorsteps of agriculture daily. One of these is facial recognition, not necessarily new when used with humans, but a cutting-edge concept in animal agriculture. David Hunt, co-founder of Cainthus, a company dedicated to digitizing ag practices, spoke to attendees of ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference about ways we can all take advantage of new developments in digitalization, automation and the cloud.

“As far as I know, we are the only company in the world that is able to tell the difference between one cow and another simply from how it looks and how it moves. Once you can tell one cow from the herd, you are able to track, monitor and build analytics based on it’s behavior. Hopefully, this will enable farmers to farm more profitability.”

This technology has only recently been economically viable in agriculture because imaging sensors have become cheap, along with data storage and transfer. David said one of the biggest cost-savors to the producers is lameness detection. Since facial recognition allows for 24/7 monitoring, the moment an animal shows signs of lameness it is spotted. Feed efficiency and general behavioral analytics are two other examples of data being collected.

There is no doubt we are living in a digitized world. David believes 20 to 30 years from now we will be talking about this era as the digitalization revolution, similar to industrial and agricultural revolutions in the past. He said he would advice any farmer to implement any technology today that is affordable on a $1/acre or $1/head that gives you digital data capture on your farming operation.

Learn more about facial recognition and the digitalization of agriculture in my complete interview iwth David: Interview with David Hunt, Cainthus

View and download photos from the event here: 2016 ONE: The Alltech Ideas Conference Photo Album