In Utah, tall towers with stacked trays are used for growing food for cows indoors. These vertical cattle feed farms called Grōv Technologies are occupying 850 Sq ft. of the ground but growing wheat, barley and grass at the capacity of 35-50 acres. The Bateman’s Dairy Farm is a pioneering technology that had started inside a building and at present hosts 10 towers which are 25 feet tall and lusciously filled with green healthy growth of wheatgrass. The farm is fully automated. About four pounds of seeds are planted by robots in each tray and stacked in the system. The monitoring of the plants is done by sensors giving the crops water and light. The harvesting is done automatically. The crop is prepared on an average of six and a half days. The system has brought down labor to operational costs. At this point, the indoor farm consumes artificial light and Air conditioning, but the company has plans to run it on renewable energy with net-zero emission by 2025.
Smart feeding technology
Early tests conducted in 2019 shows that the feed carried more nutrient than standard cattle feed. The cow ate less which saved money and at the same time produced the same amount of milk. Grōv Technologies believes this feed will help farmers break even on the investment of feed growth and technology in the coming three years. Indoors can help control temperature and climatic factors like floods, heatwaves, droughts, storms, winds and other challenges. This technology will provide sustainable support to the conventional farming process. The food that the cattle eat will be induced with nutrition and will benefit cattle. The farmlands can be replaced with forests to suck the excess carbon and restore the climatic change that we are witnessing and leave a better earth for the future generation.
What will guide feeding technology?
Feeding technology should involve skilled processing of ingredients and enhance animal feed production systems that are capable of manufacturing nutritional feed. The objective is to convert minimum quality ingredients into superior quality value feed that are enriched with improved food value. This demand places animal feed in the realms of a high social responsibility that contributes to sustainable feed in the entire production system. It is equally important to evaluate the structure and properties of the feed components and how they evolve better with primary and secondary processing. Whether they are meeting the essential demands of the animal’s growth and health. Whether they comply with the overall cost and that would include the processing and production cost adhering to social responsibilities. Considerations like carbon footprints and energy usage are the chief concerns, the use of water resources and assessment of their life cycle. Accurate technologies that fast access the variability that the ingredients comprise. Considering the processing of raw materials and equipment used in manufacturing and growth.
What will optimize cattle feed?
Cattle feed is open to wide research and right from compound feed to innovative vertical cattle feed farming concepts are making inroads in this innovative arena. Big data will play a pivotal role in determining the specific model that is most appropriate and sustainable for feed manufacturing. Resilient models that integrate the dietary ingredients through various processing conditions with optimized energy consumption in feed quality and production rate will be the future technology to embrace. A collaboration of data scientists and machine technology along with feed manufacturing technology with data analytics will be the way ahead for future feed optimization.
A constant interaction between those formulating the feed and feed technologists will determine the quality and production technology of the feed. The feed should encompass low electric energy and fossil energy consumption at the manufacturing stage.