Tuesday, August 7, 2012

There's An App For That



The University of Missouri has developed an app for judging heat stress on cows:
Research assistant Brad Scharf shows a group of teenagers clad in jeans and cowboy boots how to measure a cow's respiration. The app is still being tested, and these members from the 4-H Club and the National FFA Organization, formerly the Future Farmers of America, are the testers.
The app is a calculator of sorts. It takes the breaths per minute along with information about the cow's breed, type, what it's eating and other basic information. Then, it crunches the data and tells you how the cow's feeling in this environment. Spiers says it's surprisingly simple.
"It will automatically pull in the air temperature and humidity so that the producers or student can look at this later to see how hot their animals were under these conditions," he explains. "Then they can work with [the animals]. They can treat them differently, depending on how stressed they are."
Farmers often use fans, water misters and shades to help cool down their animals. The app can help them figure out which cows need these things most and which ones don't. And it looks into the future, too: The app uses weather forecasting to show how the cow will likely feel in a few days.
My lack of smart phone prevents me from taking advantage of this.

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