What can AI do for Irish dairy?

Ireland has the opportunity to be at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) decision making in dairy farming.

That is according to professor of marketing at University College Dublin Damien McLoughlin, who was speaking at a ‘Shaping the Future of Dairy’ event in Lyons, Co Kildare.

He said that AI will continue to play a role in agriculture with specific applications, but will not be standing on its own.

“Nowhere in the world, not in China or the US, can I see any examples of AI-led systemic changes in the food and agri industry,” he said.

“Intel probably won’t exist in five years’ time; in Germany, I’m not sure if Volkswagen will exist in five years’ time; that’s an extension of the AI revolution. There’s nothing like that on the horizon in ag; that’s good news and it’s bad news.”

Opportunities

McLoughlin spoke about the opportunities for farmers to use AI to optimise farm management and on-farm decision making.

He had visited an American farm in Boston where technology was used to file paperwork and automate farm activities. This allowed the family-sized farm to operate “as a much larger organisation than it actually was”.

McLoughlin added that Ireland is not "behind" any other country in terms of adopting AI on farms and in agribusinesses.

“I mainly deal with the companies on the other end like McDonalds or Tesco or whoever you are selling to. How they talk about Ireland; they don’t talk about Dairygold or AllTech, they talk about Ireland,” he added.

“I think that’s a huge compliment because what they see is a whole collection of companies that all have high levels of capability in production and they like the low carbon nature of grass production.”

Decision making

Also speaking at the conference, head of food and agribusiness at the Irish Farm Accounts Co-op David Leydon said he is shocked by how few people are using ChatGPT every day.

“It’s the same as having Google at your disposal and saying: ‘I’m not going to use Google because it’s a new technology’. A lot of executives in the sector still aren’t using, engaging and getting their prompts right,” he said.

“We have some small agri companies with really good GDPR-compliant data who are being matchmade with good tech companies and creating new value propositions and that’s great to see.”