Sustainable Milk Production

John Deere and DeLaval form strategic partnership.

John Deere and DeLaval have joined efforts to create the Milk Sustainability Center (MSC)—a digital eco-system to help dairy farmers improve the efficiency and sustainability of their dairy operations. The MSC will be open for partners to join, with the goal of providing farmers with data needed for a holistic view of their dairy operations.

Dairy farmers will use the MSC to monitor nutrient use efficiency (NUE) for nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, and carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e), for their entire farm, specific fields, or their herd. The MSC will also provide data to allow them to compare their performance to other dairy operations and identify key areas for improvement. MSC aims to serve dairy farmers independent of their farm machinery brands and herd management software.

"Dairy farming is perhaps the most complex agriculture business today with no system integration between crop and animal performance. Dairy farmers often use five to seven different, non-connected software solutions to run their business," said Dave Chipak, Director, Dairy & Livestock Production Systems at John Deere. "The MSC will enable dairy farmers to calculate, benchmark, simulate, and optimize NUE and CO₂e for sustainable and profitable decision making."

After farmer authorization, data from DeLaval Plus and John Deere Operations Center will be automatically pulled into the MSC. Manual data input will be reduced, ensuring high data quality, and ultimately helping an entire farm system—fields, cows, employees, advisors, machines, and other assets—work efficiently together. ‡

The initial version of MSC will be released this summer and will be free of charge. A premium version with extended capabilities will be released at a later date. For more information scan the QR code above.