HoliCow

HoliCow was born from the observation of a dramatical decrease in the number of small and medium-sized dairy farms in our territories. This decrease is multifactorial. First, access to technologies is complicated for these farms because of the investment and time needed to understand them. This leads to economic losses and lower resilience of the animals and farms. A second reason for the decrease of farm number is the detrimental opinion of the general public. Indeed, agri-bashing is very common nowadays, discouraging farmers to continue their activities.

Given the importance of these farms to maintain our landscapes, biodiversity and resilience, HoliCow partners decided to join forces to allow these farms to use affordable tools to improve their resilience and stay in business. In addition, a promotional campaign is planned to strengthen the relationship of the farmers and their local community.

Concretely, the partners previously achieved to predict biomarkers related to health, welfare, heat stress, methane emissions and other traits using the milk composition, and in particular the mid-infrared spectroscopic analysis. Now all these predictions will be gathered to create an easy-to-understand indicator to assess farm resilience. A community database will be created for farmers to help them answer the problems highlighted, with continuous improvement of the platform using feedback from users.