How many of us wish we could add time back into our days? For many of my customers who own and operate diversified operations, there never seems to be enough hours in the day to get everything done. This problem is often exacerbated by the challenge of finding skilled labor.

E-ID tags can be helpful for cattle operations, offering accurate data collection, compliance with USDA standards and increased efficiency. They help producers manage cattle records and improve overall productivity.

If you have ever tried to recall where you wrote down a cow’s tag number or decipher pen marks on the back of your hand after a long day of processing cattle, you know the frustrations of recordkeeping. Recordkeeping isn’t always the easiest task, but it plays an important role in informing management decisions.

Beef producers face countless obstacles in raising high-quality, nutritious products. Deficiencies, avoidances and half-hearted energies directed toward any management area will result in mediocre performance, reduced profitability at a minimum and financial disaster in the worst cases.

Just as the steam engine and mechanization revolutionized agriculture during the first and second industrial revolutions, today's digital technologies are ushering in what some call the third industrial revolution.

The term, “precision agriculture” is oftentimes associated with row crop farming, but what if gathering critical data to inform decision-making could be applied to your cow-calf operation or feedlot?

The usage of technology has also been utilized in the beef industry, such as with RFID tags, genomic testing and robotics. The newest technology to enter the ring is artificial intelligence (AI), which is continuing to develop for the use of facial recognition in cattle, which is being implemented, and which can contribute to a national disease animal traceability program with a developing app called CattleTracs.

The more we understand automation, the better equipped we are to make it work for us. Let's explore the top five reasons for automating the milking routine on a dairy.

Going mobile provides rapid cowside entry and quick access to your herd’s data. It allows you to make decisions instantly – instead of later when entering the data into your herd management software.