A pedometer tied to the leg of a cow and some real time data analysis not only can help in monitoring the health of the animal but also in detecting its estrus and even to control the gender of its offspring.
Speaking about the agricultural cloud service developed by Fujitsu on the second day of the Build 2015 conference here, Microsoft's Joseph Sirosh said, "It's perhaps the most amazing story in the cloud ... It is about human ingenuity and how this new technology is revolutionising even some of the world's oldest industries, such as dairy farming."
Giving the case study of cows, Indian American Sirosh, said the data from wireless pedometers are sent over the wire to a service on the cloud, on Microsoft Azure, where it is analysed and from the footsteps of cow it is detected when it goes into heat and subsequently alerts are sent on the farmer's phone.
So the farmer knows which cow went into heat and exactly when, he said.
Sirosh, the corporate vice president, Information Management and Machine Learning team in the Cloud and Enterprise group at Microsoft Corp., highlighted how the feedback generated by the data analysis could help farmer control the gender of the offspring according to their farm requirement.
"Now Fujitsu researchers found something else that was very amazing. There's a window around that optimum. If in the first four hours of that window if you performed you would get a female and the second, next four hours, you would get a male.
"So the farmer now had an amazing control at his disposal," he said adding that the farmer could choose the gender of the calf based on the needs of his dairy farm.
Not only that, Fujitsu found that by analysing the step patterns of cows they could detect about eight different diseases, the official said arguing the point how modern day data analysis on cloud could help in achieving big things.
"With the power of the cloud some even really small companies are able to make that dream come true at a speed that no one else can.
"That agility, by the way, that agility is a hallmark of the cloud, and that is its magic," he said.
"The cloud turns hardware into software; software into services, fully managed services; and data into intelligence. It makes you smart and it lets you free," Sirosh told the audience amidst applause.
