Dairy farms employ tech to ramp up production, offer milk that's pure

Happy Milk is one among the many dairy farms that are employing state-of-the-art technologies to produce organic milk in a cost-efficient way

Number 0101 starts her day early — at 3am, to be precise. Soft flute music plays in the background to keep her relaxed and a Fitbit type of wearable device tracks her health in real-time. If it detects any variations in her health parameters, an alert is sent to a doctor via a mobile app and a check-up follows.

Number 0101 is one of 400 cows at Happy Milk, a dairy farm start-up which is betting heavily on technology to automate its operations. Spread across 30 acres of land in the industrial city of Tumkur, about 150 km from Bengaluru, the one-year-old company produces and sells organic milk and milk products such as yogurt, paneer and ghee. 

“For us, technology is key,” says Mehal Kejriwal, 22, who co-founded Happy Milk with her father Vivek Kejriwal, the owner of Sunvik Steels. She explains that the entire process of milk production and packaging is technology-driven and untouched by hand, which also rules out the chances of adulteration. Thanks to automation, they can also manage the huge farm with just 15 people, she says.

At Happy Milk, technology is used in multiple ways. Sensors installed in the cow sheds monitor and regulate the ambient temperature. If, for example, the temperature is found to be too warm for the animals, the artificial intelligence-powered electric fans are automatically switched on.

That’s not all. Twice a day the cows are taken to a ‘milking parlour’ where an equipment called ‘milking cluster’ is attached to their udders to extract the milk. Then the milk automatically passes through various pipes and tanks for processes such as homogenisation and pasteurisation before it is packaged and labelled in glass bottles. A software captures the milking data and sends live reports on email and alerts on the phone. Machines are also used to collect the cow dung and deposit it into a biogas plant, which, Kejriwal says, produces the energy needed to run the entire farm. 

The investment in technology has paid off. Happy Milk now produces 4,000 litres of milk per day and plans to increase its capacity to 10,000 litres a day. “On an average, our cows give 15 litres of milk per day whereas cows elsewhere produce only 10 litres of milk per day,” says Samadhan Ghodake, a dairy technologist at the farm. 

Happy Milk  is just one among the many dairy farms that are employing state-of-the-art technologies to produce organic milk in a cost-efficient way. “Input costs are very high in dairy farms. Technology can help lower that,” says Srikanth Nadhamuni, CEO of start-up incubator Khosla Labs and former chief technology officer for Aadhaar.

A Happy Milk retail stall

Agrees K C Raghu, a food scientist and founder of Pristine Organics, a Bengaluru-based firm which makes organic and nutritional products, “In dairy farming, technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics hold great promise.”

India’s dairy industry is expected to maintain a 15 per cent compounded annual growth (CAGR) and attain a value of Rs 9.4 trillion by 2020, according to a report by Edelweiss Securities. Evidently, it’s the potential in the market that is giving rise to a slew of end-to-end dairy technology ventures. 

One of them is Stellapps, which leverages technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), data analytics and cloud computing to improve milk production and for animal insurance and farmer payments. The firm, which was founded by a group of IITians, gets the relevant data via sensors that are embedded in the milking systems and through animal wearable technology.

Kiaro in Hyderabad, Pride of Cows in Mumbai and Akshayakalpa in Tiptur, Karnataka, are some other dairy farms that have employed sophisticated technologies to feed and milk cows and to process the milk.

“We are using IoT technology across our sourcing, sales and distribution,” says Srikumar Misra, the founder of Milk Mantra, India’s first venture capital-funded dairy start-up. The Odisha-based Milk Mantra sources milk from more than 55,000 dairy farmers.  

“We have been capturing our farmer data right from day one, and now this process has been automated and the data stored in the cloud,” says Misra, who started the firm in 2009 after leaving a successful corporate career at Tata Group. Milk Mantra uses machine learning to discern various parameters such as the quality of the milk provided by farmers to their collection centres. The firm, whose flagship brand is Milky Moo, has recently received a US patent for MooShake, the world’s first shelf-stable milkshake product infused with curcumin. 

As for Happy Milk, it retails its products across stores in Bengaluru and also through app-based milk aggregators such as Doodhwala, DailyNinja and Milkbasket. At Rs 80 a litre, Happy Milk isn’t cheap. But if the milk is pure, who isn’t happy to pay the price?

Moo Moo …smarter  

Fitbit type health bands: The IoT-enabled bands attached to a cow’s legs track its health parameters and constantly beam those to a back-end mobile app monitored by veterinarians

Smart temperature controller: Sensors installed in the shed constantly monitor the temperature and communicate with electric fans when it becomes too hot for animals

Automated cleansing system: Automated machines remove cow dung and deposit it into a biogas plant which supplies  electricity to the farm

Milking cluster: Automatic devices milk the cows and send it for processing without human intervention