We have grass-to-glass & cows-to-cloud strategies at work: Chitale Dairy's CTO

Vishvas Chitale, the CEO and chief technology officer of the 84 years old Chitale Dairy told TechCircle that while the dairy industry contributes more to the country’s GDP than rice and wheat combined, the sector suffers from poor productivity per animal when compared with countries like New Zealand, Australia, the US, or even Israel. To overcome this and many other challenges, Chitale Dairy is betting on cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, which has resulted in a doubling of farmer income in the last three years. 

In a detailed interview, Chitale spoke about what are the various tech initiatives undertaken by his firm and what is the future scope. Edited excerpt:

What is your cows-to-cloud strategy?

We initiated our cows-to-cloud strategy about 15 years back. The idea behind this strategy is to use data to help farmers with the entire lifecycle management of dairy animals. It started with providing genomic information and evaluation of the animals, along with health and overall lifecycle management. Such data and insights were then disseminated through SMS or phone call. This way, the whole ecosystem of producing quality milk, cattle’s genomic information, and their health status was monitored by the system. Our cows-to-cloud strategy matured and currently, we process the data of 20,000 animals on the cloud.

During the pandemic, we started introducing a new concept called grass-to-glass. With cows-to-cloud, we could mainly do cow lifecycle management, but with the new strategy, we are taking care of farmers' input, the entire farmers' supply chain, route optimisation, advising farmers on the kind of fodder they should grow and use to enhance the productivity of their farm output, and finally offer them a wider array of mobile applications. To this end, we have leveraged VMWare’s cloud-native application platform called Tanzu.

During the pandemic, we also undertook a complete re-modernisation of our applications. We now use LAMP (an acronym for operating system, Linux; the web server, Apache; the database server, MySQL; and the programming language, PHP)-based stack.

How big is your technology team and what are the main tasks undertaken?

We have about 25 people working on the technology team — front and back-end developers, UI/UX team and an infrastructure team. The three teams are working in tandem. So, we have a complete stack-up Tanzu portfolio, where we have data centres located in three diverse geographies and where we are using heavy load balancers. We have implemented a complete continuous integration/continuous delivery (CICD) flow, which is replicated across the three sites. Apart from the three cloud sites, we have the option to go to a public cloud, should there be any bursting demand, which is usually observed during festivals. 

How do you leverage emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence?

We have collected a huge amount of animal and cattle data over the last couple of years. We are using this data to prepare AI models and offer a slew of pre-emptive services to farmers. For instance, such models together with genomics, can be used to select a good genetic bull (called father) to get better-performing daughter calves. One of our cows could produce over 70 liters of milk a day; this kind of performance has only been possible with all the data and recordings that we process.

Further, with better data assimilation, we are able to accurately understand changing consumer behaviours, disease patterns in cows, nutritional deficiency, and complete blood profile of the animals. AI and machine learning can also be used for better modeling of our processing plant so that production is safer and more efficient. AI-modelled plants also take continuous feedback to keep improving their operations. 

What are the key challenge areas in the dairy industry where technological intervention could help?

One of the major issues the dairy industry has been facing is that of unseasonal rain which hampers animal productivity. Like crop science, we need better climate monitoring systems that can do predictive analysis for increased productivity. 

Secondly, technology could also help on the distribution side of things. There are more investments needed to modernise the complete food chain so that ultimately farmers get a good price for their produce.