“The cow at the edge of Tony Louters’s dairy farm in Merced, Calif., held 11 gallons of milk and a secret: In the next 48 hours, she would become sick.

On many farms, the health signs would have gone undetected, costing hundreds of dollars in lost milk. But thanks to a high-tech collar that each of Mr. Louters’s 700 cows wears around its neck — fitted with movement sensors and Wi-Fi — he learned the cow’s diagnosis at 5:30 a.m. when his computer pinged with an alert about its biometric data…

The devices are part of an industry known as precision farming, a data-driven approach for optimizing production that is booming with the addition of A.I. and other technologies. Last year, the livestock-monitoring industry alone was valued at more than $5 billion, according to Grand View Research, a market research firm.

Farmers have long used technology to collect and analyze data, with the origins of precision farming dating to the 1990s. In the early 2000s, satellite imagery changed the way farmers determined crop schedules, as did drones and eventually sensors in the fields. Nowadays, if you drive by farms in places like California’s Central Valley, you may not see any humans at all…

The new products are helping farmers reduce costs as tariffs and inflation raise the prices of farm equipment and feed. They also allow farmers to do more work with fewer people as the Trump administration cracks down on illegal immigration.”

From New York Times.