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Digitizing the management of cattle farms to reduce their environmental impact, improve animal welfare and ensure safe, high-quality feed. This is the soul of the experimental project in which the following collaborate Parmalat, a company of the Lactalis group in Italy and a leader in the dairy sector, and xFarm Technologies, the tech company that has developed a digital platform to easily help farmers, and from today also breeders, at every stage of production. A collaboration born from shared values and with the common intent of ensuring efficiency, sustainability and traceability of the milk production chain through the potential of digital.
"At xFarm the mission is to improve through digital the lives of millions of farmers, consequently promoting more sustainable agriculture. The project carried out together with Parmalat, in particular, allows us to provide our expertise and approach the milk supply chain in a gradual way in order to better intercept the needs of dairy farms and make them even more efficient. This first phase, in fact, allows us to test the platform and the attached technology to be implemented later on a large scale - explains Matteo Vanotti, CEO of xFarm
"Innovation is in our DNA, and with this project we have a threefold purpose: to study pioneering practices in favor of animal welfare, to guarantee the consumer a product that is increasingly in line with sustainability requirements, and to lay the foundations for an increasingly evolved and technologically advanced profession," says Maurizio Bassani, General Manager of Parmalat. " Together with xFarm we will be able to simplify and make usable data on the main parameters for understanding how animals are fed, how the food for them is produced, and how the digestive and manure management process takes place: Knowing how our conferees' stables operate is the first step to comparing data and sharing the right solutions to reduce their environmental impact."
Animal feed and manure produced are the two main aspects that contribute to increasing the barn carbon footprint; therefore, the project aims to work in this direction through technological acquisition and data comparison.
The pilot project with Parmalat starting in June 2022 will last for five years. In the first phase, 47 stables belonging to three different supply chains will be involved , spread over different areas of the Italian territory: the Aqua Supply Chain and the Bio Supply Chain (32 stables located in Friuli-Venezia Giulia that deliver milk for Montasio DOP, fresh milk and organic milk), the Parmigiano Reggiano Bio Supply Chain (7 stables located in Parma) and finally the Rome BIO Supply Chain (8 Bio stables in the province of Rome).
For this project, xFarm will enrich its platform with a new breeding-specific function that enables the control of feeding plans through a system of automatic compilation of certain information such as the composition and quantity of rations fed, herd management on base of cow characteristics and, finally, traceability with a view to supply chain sustainability thanks to technologically advanced sensors and the use of different IoT instrumentation installed inside the stables.
How will this all happen? By directly involving the entire supply chain and with an ad hoc training course for breeders. In fact, the project will be presented to farmers through a series of meetings organized by Parmalat and supply chain managers, with the support of xFarm. Subsequently, training sessions are planned to introduce xFarm and the main functions of the tool and follow-up activities so that this new initiative is assimilated by the breeders.
After the first experimental phase, the project will monitor 100 cowsheds in an initial phase, eventually tracking as many as 400 cowsheds among those that deliver milk to the various Parmalat plants throughout Italy, with the aim of enriching product traceability data and increasingly guaranteeing transparency of raw materials to consumers, thus making them more aware of their purchases.
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