You all have this cliché in mind of cows grazing quietly in their meadow with a bell around their neck. But on this farm in Seine-et-Marne, the cows have a very different collar. “There is a solar panel on each side of the collar and a battery below, explains Baptiste, livestock manager with more than 400 cows, bulls or calves to manage. With our smartphone, we draw a virtual fence three meters before this limit. The collar will make a melody and if the animal exceeds the limit, it will take a current.
The Salon de l’Agriculture in Paris opened on Friday February 25 and lasts until March 6. More than 1,000 exhibitors show visitors behind the scenes of their operations, but there are also more than 60 start-ups who will present their innovations. Because like Baptiste on this farm in Seine-et-Marne, many farmers are fond of new technologies.
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Thanks to the collars, the Ile-de-France animals are geolocated and above all, they can graze in the various fields of the farm without an electrified fence. “When harvesting potatoes, we always leave very small potatoes, shots. They remained in the ground and decomposed. While there, they benefited the cows. Then, we put them in rapeseed volunteers and they ate everything they could. And to finish, we passed them through regrowth wheat. The same, it allowed us to avoid a blow from the crusher.”
A simpler method, according to livestock manager, than that of putting temporary fences on the meadows. “You would have to drive in the stakes, then unroll the wires, when you just have to trace on the smartphone, it goes much faster, he explains. For the farm, these are key savings.
“The advantage is that we arrive in principle towards the end of August-beginning of September at a time when there is no longer too much grass in the pastures, especially with the dry years that we have had. So this makes it possible to valorize all this feed for the cattle and avoid typing in the winter stock of fodder.”
Baptiste, livestock managerat franceinfo
Animals may also one day be equipped with another type of collar, which this time would be connected to monitor their health. “He will detect anything that is activity or ruminationexplains Baptiste. The advantage of having this system is that if we receive an SMS or an alert that the calf has not moved, we immediately know that we have to go and see.
Breeders keen on new technologies: their farm is also equipped with solar panels and a biogas production unit from manure and cereal dust.