Medicine records scanner wins innovation award at National Dairy Show
Herdwatch was the big winners in the 2018 version of the National Dairy Innovation Awards, which were sponsored by Carbery Group.
The awards were presented at the National Dairy Show, which took place at the Green Glens Arena, Millstreet, Co Cork, last Saturday.
The overall winning innovation was the Farm Medicine Scanner feature on the latest version of the Herdwatch application.
The app is well established since its launch in 2014 and is now used on over 8,000 farms across Ireland and the UK .
The new award winning feature utilises the technology available through the camera function in a smart phone, and makes recording medicines as simple as taking a picture.
It allows farmers using the Herdwatch app to simply scan the barcode or QR on the medicine, and have all the important information load into the app through that.
This information includes medicine expiry date, withdrawal periods, and batch codes, that previousky needed to be input one by one for farmers’ obligatory medicine remedy records.
The judges for the overall prize were impressed by how easy the Farm Medicine Scanner is to use, and by the time spent at administration office work which it would save dairy farmers.
Herdwatch suggests that it will save over three hours per week, as well as improving medicine traceability on the farm.
“We were over the moon to receive gold in the technology category, but to win the overall National Dairy Innovation Award 2018 was a genuine shock. It’s a huge honour because we know the calibre of winners that have gone before us, and we also know the weight that farmers place on these awards,” said Herdwatch CEO Fabien Peyaud.
The National Dairy Innovation Awards were judged by a panel of six practically minded judges.
They included ex-Macra and CEJA president Alan Jagoe, Paula Hynes of RTÉ Hardest Harvest fame, and 2019 Nuffield Scholar and milk quality expert Ailish Moriarty.
The Herdwatch Farm Medicine Scanner was earlier announced as the Gold Award winner in the technology section.
The other Gold Award winners were Cormac Tagging, with their Tissue Sample Wristband, in the engineering section, and Micromax Plant Health, with their dry footbath Mistral Dairy product in the science section.
Other National Dairy Innovation Award winners who received silver awards were ICBF for Cow’s Own Worth in the science section; John Porter Engineering for the DCC Waterbed in the engineering section; and True North Technology for their WeighRight product, in the technology section.
