Chitale Dairy takes cows to cloud

Much before the dairy cooperative movement took roots in the country, the trail to milk

revolution was set ablaze by Babasaheb Chitale. The journey began in 1939, in the small town

of Bhilwadi which set the stage for a revolution in the country's dairy industry. Babasaheb

along with a group of farmers, procured buffalo milk from the adjoining areas of his hometown,

which was pasteurized mechanically and dispatched for sale.

Sachin Wagh a regular supplier of milk since last eight years from Sangli district in

Maharashtra is an empowered farmer of Chitales. Sachin owns 20 cows which are tagged with

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) labels on each ear which, when scanned by the RIFD

reader, transmit information about each one of them back to the data centre at Chitale Dairy.

RIFD tags are washable and farmers have cell. phones to record and track the health and

nutrition of the cons and buffaloes, and the amount of milk they produce. RIFD sends Wagh

periodic text messages (in Marathi) that alert him to any specific need about individual cows.

A cow. for instance, may be in poor health, may need supplements, or may be about to deliver

a calf. SMSs are sent both to Wagh and the veterinarian for action, as and when required.

While Chitale Dairy has been using RFID tags for over a decade to track cows and

buffaloes, it also began transmitting the data to improve the productivity of its business,

efficiency of the farmers, and milk yield of the cattle over the last couple of years. Vishvas

Chitale, director of Chitale Dairy and a third-generation entrepreneur, likes to label the journey

as "cows to cloud and loT (Internet of Things)" since the data is transmitted over the cloud and

can be accessed on desktops while the factory data from the multiple sensors help in "plant

automation and analytics.

At Chitale Dairy, equipment like evaporators, spray dryers, pasteurizers, boilers,

chillers, refrigerators and packaging machines are automated by Rockwell Automation.

VMWare Inc. has helped Chitale Dairy consolidate its two separate data centers since the dairy

faced operational challenges with 10 physical servers spread across two data centers in a town

500 km from the nearest city. Dell Inc. developed a process called virtualization on servers by

which two physical operations were consolidated into one virtual data centre. This has reduced

Chitale Dairy's hardware and software acquisition costs and also lowered its power

consumption. The dairy also upgraded its network with the help from Dell to support the

internal cloud used for the data management needs of its research farm, the monitoring of

logistical efficiency and factory energy consumption, and the storage and delivery of unique

animal data. This also helped in eliminating delays that impede daily delivery schedule for

fresh milk products. Chitale Dairy is a fine example of Dell's future-ready enter- prise, built on

Dell's future-ready IT foundation and an agile infrastructure that can bridge the gap between

traditional and new IT paradigms. Farmers are seeing tangible benefits from the use of

technology in these dairies.