Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Climate change is impacting milk production worldwide. For instance, increased heat stress in cows is causing average-sized dairy farms losing thousands of milk gallons each year; drastic climate change, especially in developing countries, pushing small farmers below the poverty line and is triggering suicides due to economic stress and social stigma. It’s profoundly clear that current dairy agriculture practices are falling short to counter the impacts of climate change. What we need are innovative and intelligent dairy farming techniques that employ best of traditional practices with data infused insights. However, there wasn’t any heat stress-to-climate models nor were the data. To overcome the data challenge, we have developed low-cost ($20 per cattle) dairy sensors and deployed in Punjab and Telangana states, and collected, at every 5-minute interval from 09/18/2015 to 11/22/2017, cattle activity, body temperature, and humidity. The application data science technique is known as Decision Tree on the data (approximately168 million records) with medication, geospatial (ambient temperature/humidity) data has helped us to develop cattle heat stress-to-climate decision models with the accuracy of 73%. The deployment of this data science algorithm into sensors, making it a precision sensor, enabled to deliver early warning heat-stress related notifications to small farmers. This has led small farmers to take proactive actions such as cooling dairy cattle through watering or improving dairy farm ventilation air-flow systems. Finally, we staunchly believe that perpetual learning, by man or by machine, and dissemination of information are the best defense to counter the effects of climate change.