Author: info@irishwebservices.ie

Today (Monday 19^th September), Pearson Milking Technology, won the Farm Automation Award and was also the overall winner collecting the Innovator of the Year Award for Established Company at this years Enterprise Ireland Innovation Awards at the National Ploughing Championships. Headquartered in Athy, Co Kildare for over 75 years, Pearson Milking Technology supplies dairy equipment and technology to farmers in Ireland, the UK and 20 countries globally.

Using both vision technology and artificial intelligence, their winning innovation is an automated body condition scoring product called Bullseye. The Body Condition Score of a cow is a key metric in assessing the animal in terms of whether they are under or overweight. By automatically estimating the Body Condition Score of the animal, feed can be adjusted which in turn helps to keep the cow in ideal condition impacting on fertility, sustainability and of course animal welfare.

Director, David Pearson commented, “Pearson Milking Technology was founded in 1948 by our grandparents. Our Granny was an entrepreneur and our Grandad was an engineer. Since then we have manufactured milking equipment and technology for dairy farms from 5 cows to 5,000 cows. To be the overall winner of the Innovation Awards at this years National Ploughing Championship is very important to us and is a great accolade for us when we go to meet our international partners”.

Director Lloyd Pearson, added, “Bullseye came from an on-farm problem. We took this challenge back to our R&D lab, collaborated with Technological University Dublin and are now delighted to be launching this product for dairy farmers at this years National Ploughing Championship. Body condition scoring is a time consuming, subjective piece of work. As herd sizes increase, we see a really important role for Bullseye in automating body condition scoring and giving real time decision making information to dairy farmers”.

Pearson Milking Technology’s Lee Wilson who headed up the Bullseye project, commented, “We had an excellent collaboration with TU Dublin. We engage heavily in R&D to improve our technology for dairy farmers and the expertise of the team in TU Dublin added significant value. Our Bullseye automated body condition scoring product involves both IoT and sensor technology. This innovation will make a significant difference to dairy farmers in Ireland, the UK and internationally from both an economic and environmental sustainability perspective as well as from an animal welfare perspective”.

Speaking on behalf of Enterprise Ireland James Moloney commented, “ Pearson Milking Technology have developed a really smart solution, a really good labour saving device on farm. We see this as a solution which has applicability across any milking platform across the globe. With Bullseye, Pearson’s have taken their business one step further and integrated artificial intelligence and computer vision into a really exciting new product.”