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Teats and tweets

A unique project brings daily activities of milking cows to new media tool Twitter.

This article appears in this month’s Ontario Dairy Farmer magazine and is the full length version of shorter blog article I posted here a couple of weeks ago.

They’re an unlikely team – a new media researcher in Waterloo, an English professor from Georgia, a Brant County dairy farmer and 12 Holstein cows.

But they’ve come together in a unique social media project that looks at the way humans interact with animals and has the cows posting their daily activities on Twitter. Continue reading Teats and tweets

Cows that moo…and tweet!

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to visit a dairy farm in Brant County, southwest of Toronto. It was a beautiful farm with a state of the art robotic milking system – which basically means, the cows decide for themselves when they’re ready to be milked and the machine takes care of it, saving a lot of time and work for farmer Chris Vandenberg.

Now this in itself was cool as I had never seen one of these set ups before, even though they are starting to become more in Ontario. But what really tweaked my interest, as a self-professed social media and new technology geek, was that some of Chris’ cows have their own Twitter accounts and are merrily tweeting away as they go about their daily lives! Continue reading Cows that moo…and tweet!

Presenting modern agriculture

Here’s a great blog post about modern agriculture and bridging the gap between farmers and consumers.

It’s written by Australian journalist Pip Courtney of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (the Aussie equivalent of the CBC here in Canada), whom I had the opportunity to meet while attending the International Federation of Agriculture Journalists (IFAJ) congress in Texas earlier this year.
Continue reading Presenting modern agriculture

A booming milk alternative

goats Many people today have to avoid milk and dairy products in their diets because of allergies or intolerances. But luckily for them, there is an alternative – and one that is becoming increasingly popular and increasingly available in Ontario. Continue reading A booming milk alternative

What’s in a name? More milk!

Names are important to cows.

So much so, it seems, that they’ll produce more milk, say researchers in Britain.

A study by a research team at Newcastle University has found that cows with names will produce up to 500 pints more milk than those without names. Continue reading What’s in a name? More milk!

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A booming milk alternative

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