Kristen Clark

Partnering with Artificial Intelligence to make dairy farm decisions

There could soon be a new tool helping workers make decisions on Kristen Clark’s family dairy farm at Finley, NSW, and she’s not afraid of using emerging technologies. 

Kristen’s family runs 1,300 cows and employs 15 staff in a mixed housed and grazing system in southern NSW. Volatile irrigation allocations, rainfall, widely varying fodder costs and production data, means making clear and objective management decisions can be challenging.

She sees her research, “AI as a decision support: Building drought resilience in the Australian dairy industry”, as the opportunity to determine if Artificial Intelligence (AI) can draw the information together and use all of it to inform decisions.

In practice, it could mean soil moisture levels or irrigation allocations immediately feed into predictions for fodder requirements. That’s especially relevant in periods of drought, where Kristen said bias can influence decisions.

AI is not widely used in agriculture yet, and Kristen said the objectivity and the encompassing nature of the tool, as well as the speed with which it can deliver options, was something which could promote resilience in all seasons and especially in droughts.

Her study will take her to Chile and Argentina, where AI is used to improve water use efficiency, and the United States, to look at digital twins of farms and she plans to make her farm a test case for its use.