In the quiet predawn hours of Merced, California, a computer alert woke Tony Louters before the sun could rise over his dairy farm. One of his 700 cows—a seemingly healthy Holstein—was on the verge of illness. Within 30 minutes, Louters had administered a simple remedy of probiotics and warm water, averting what could have been a costly bout of sickness. The early warning didn’t come from a seasoned farmhand’s intuition, but from a high-tech collar wrapped around the cow’s neck, humming with sensors and Wi-Fi.
The device, made by Merck, is part of a wave of precision farming tools that are transforming agriculture into a data-driven industry. What began as a rudimentary pedometer for cows in 2013 has evolved into a sophisticated system of wearables, powered by artificial intelligence and advanced sensors. These collars monitor everything from digestion patterns to movement, flagging anomalies before they escalate into full-blown health crises. For Louters, who has used the technology since its inception, the collars are as close as he’ll get to a conversation with his herd. “It’s like they’re telling us what they need,” he said.
This quiet revolution isn’t confined to dairy farms. Across California’s Central Valley—a region responsible for half of America’s fruits and vegetables—autonomous tractors navigate fields using the same sensor technology as self-driving cars, while AI-equipped cameras assess the ripeness of apples and cherries with millimeter precision. The shift reflects a broader trend: farming is becoming less about brute labor and more about bytes and algorithms. According to the US Department of Agriculture, 70% of large farms now use precision technologies like GPS yield mapping and auto-steering tractors, up from less than 10% in the early 2000s. The global livestock-monitoring market alone surpassed $5 billion last year, fueled by cheaper sensors, more powerful AI, and the pressing need to cut costs amid rising feed prices and labor shortages.
The economic pressures are real. Tariffs, inflation, and stricter immigration policies under the Trump administration have squeezed farmers, forcing them to do more with less. “The tech is getting faster every year,” noted Deepak Joshi, a precision agriculture professor at Kansas State University. “We used to see new tools every few years. Now it’s every six months.” For startups like Orchard Robotics, which builds AI-powered cameras to track fruit growth, the demand is insatiable. Founder Charlie Wu sends his engineers to work directly on farms each month, ensuring the technology solves real-world problems rather than hypothetical ones.
Merck’s foray into cow collars began in 2019 when it acquired Allflex, a pioneer in livestock wearables. Today, the company monitors over two million cows—20% of the U.S. herd—through a subscription model costing around $3 per cow per month. The collars focus on digestion, tracking the intricate process of rumination (how cows break down food across their four stomachs) and alerting farmers to irregularities within hours. Some versions even include ear tags that glow blue to signal which cows need attention, turning barns into something resembling a high-tech command center.
For farmers like Annie Vannurden, who manages Warner Dairy in South Dakota, the impact is measurable. Since adopting the collars last year, she’s expanded her herd from 2,700 to 5,000 cows without hiring additional workers. The system’s data integrates with electronic gates that sort cows by health status, allowing her team to focus only on the 2% to 5% that require attention each day. The rest? They’re left to graze—and produce. Vannurden’s cows average 80 pounds of milk daily, but that can climb to 85 if they’re “especially happy and healthy.” In an industry where margins are razor-thin, she said, “a few extra pounds per cow, multiplied by thousands, really adds up.”
Back in Merced, Louters oversees his operation from a control room bristling with monitors. Every morning, he generates reports from the collar data, directing workers to cows that might be falling ill or ready for breeding. A PhD nutritionist fine-tunes the cows’ diet—ground corn, amino acids, minerals—adjusting ingredients by the ounce based on the data. “Before, if something was wrong, workers would send me a photo of the cow,” Louters recalled. “Now they send me a picture of the graphs.” Over the past decade, he estimates the collars have saved his farm nearly $1 million in health and labor costs.
Yet the future of T&C Louters Dairy remains uncertain. Louters, who once dreamed of being