Raising cows in the cloud

A transport truck full of fresh milk slowly approaches the gate of the Mengniu factory in Lingwu, an industrial city in southwest China’s Ningxia Hui region. Once the truck’s license plate number is identified, the factory gates open automatically to allow the vehicle inside. 

Drivers entering the factory use an app to follow a series of instructions sent by the Operations Center. The instructions govern activities including inspecting samples of ingredients brought into the facility, weighing those ingredients, and even cleaning the trucks after they’ve made their deliveries.

Beneath this small app sits a larger, enterprise-level program based on Huawei’s smart campus solution. It uses IoT, AI and big data technologies to give Mengniu unified management and control over its entire factory.

Digital cockpits and smart pastures

A remote central-control system known as a digital cockpit links all the devices in the factory, which has 24 production lines. Each package of milk must pass through more than 100 business process nodes, and more than 100 separate inspections. The whole process is digitally controlled.

Mengniu has 38 production bases in China, plus three more located in Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia.

In addition, the company has established a smart pasture system that uses the Internet of Things to keep track of more than 1 million cows across 800 pastures run by Mengniu’s partners. Cows wear biometric collars that monitor their vital signs, automatically recording their location, heart rate, breathing, and degree of daily physical activity. This data is transmitted to a cloud-based system for analysis, allowing veterinarians and others to track the health of the cows and ensure maximum milk production.

Powered by digital technology, traditional animal husbandry is becoming a highly digitalized industry, and this can be seen along Mengniu’s entire industry chain.