Editor's note: The CEO Corner contains editors' compilations of business news from top publications, which they have tailored for the dairy industry. My local post office in Jerome, Idaho, recently asked me if I wanted to sign up for Informed Delivery, a free new offering from the USPS.
The online service allows you to see up to 10 images of mail that will be delivered to your physical mailbox on your phone, or all images for the forthcoming mail at the Postal Service’s website.
Why would I be writing about mail delivery in a CEO column? Well, part of a dairy farm CEO’s job is to envision and anticipate new uses for currently available technology. I believe the post office has some lessons in tech-dreaming for dairy farmers.
For years, the U.S. Postal Service has been using cameras to sort mail as it whizzes by them in distribution centers. Why not use those same cameras to take a picture and send the image of the letter to the recipient faster than the physical mail can actually deliver it? That’s exactly what the Postal Service is doing now.
Granted, when the Postal Service started using camera-sorting, the cameras it was using probably lacked capacity to capture a clear image at a high speed, nor was digital storage cheap enough to cache all those images. Uploading the image files would have taken too long. However, as we all know, technology advances, and at a rapid pace. As it zips by, it creates new uses for old things. For example, cameras get smaller and faster every year, as does data storage. Internet connections become more readily available and faster. All of those advancements make possible the Postal Service’s new offering.
Miro Copic, a marketing professor at San Diego State University, told NBC in an interview about the new service, that it may get younger consumers hopping to their mailboxes again.
“This makes postal mail more interesting to millennials, who are on their devices all day long,” Copic said in an article posted April 3.
I invite you to expand your vision of how dairy farms could use camera-related technology in the future.
First, earlier this year a California dairy farm installed military-developed facial recognition technology to use a cow’s hide pattern to track how long it eats. No doubt this technology will be able to one day track how long it lies down and when it is in heat. But what if it could also take a picture once a day and send it to a curious consumer? Think of the email header: “Beach-like weather for your milk supplier. Click here to see for yourself.” The first line of the email might read: “The cow that produced the milk in your fridge is enjoying 68-degree weather in her sand-bedded barn.” This is where that photo captured by the facial recognition software would be inserted. Heck, one day a consumer may even be able to click and view a live-streaming video of that cow.
Next, consider the possibility that body condition scoring (BCS) cameras offer. Dairyman Paul Rovey told us that he takes a photo of every cow before it leaves his farm. Imagine if that process could be automated with a BCS camera mounted over an exit chute. The camera could take a photo of the cow and store it for a predetermined period of time. (Paul keeps his photos for up to three months.)
Maybe someday the camera could even send the image to a slaughterhouse or an auction that will be receiving the cow. They would then know what condition they should be receiving the cow in. Right now commercial BCS cameras are not storing any images that they capture. But I don’t doubt that one day they could.
So when you see new technology introduced into the dairy industry, consider not only what it does now, but also imagine what it could potentially do in the future.
By the way, the post office sent me images today of what I believe is a graduation announcement from my cousin and a bill for my new garage door. I look forward to opening the announcement, not the bill. Bills always wake me up from tech-dreaming and bring me back to reality. 
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Walt Cooley
- Editor-in-chief
- Progressive Dairyman
- Email Walt Cooley
PHOTO 1: A live video image capable of tracking how long each cow was eating caught the attention of Maddox Dairy last year. The dairy has since installed the first commercial test of computer vision technology on a livestock farm. Illustration by Kristen Phillips.
