Food Union creates digital tool for Latvian farmers

In order to help Latvia’s dairy industry keep up with the times and become more efficient, more innovative and technologically advanced, Latvia’s leading dairy group Food Union has created an interactive platform called Smart Dairy Farmer. It is the first such tool in the digital environment for Latvian farmers to assist them with keeping track of and analyzing different data on milk sold for processing, and thus efficiently plan farm resources and operations.

The key features of the new platform offer farmers, who have developed long-term cooperation with Food Union, the opportunity to see and analyze, for any particular cooperation period, such data such as the quantity of milk sold and the quality of its components, including milk fat and protein content. Farmers can also keep track of financial data with the help of the tool, including data on payment amounts the farmer has received and the total amount of milk sold, as well as his or her average milk price and how it correlates with the average market price.

“Transparency, traceability and loyalty are integral part of the dairy industry, so by sharing the data in a convenient and easy-to-use way – features that are at the heart of the new platform – we become more open as an organization, while our partners, the best farmers in Latvia, become even smarter and more progressive. This is an essential contribution to our mutual relationship. At the same time, it also sets a new standard for dairy business management and raises the industry, based on centuries-old traditions, to a modern level, also raising the bar higher not only for dairy farms and companies in Latvia, but also in the neighbor countries. I am calling on every user of the new tool to be active and give us feedback on its operation and desired improvements so that its functionality becomes even more handy and useful,” emphasizes Harijs Panke, Deputy Chairman of the Board at Food Union Group’s company Rīgas Piena Kombināts.

Data on the Smart Dairy Farming platform are updated on a regular basis – twice or thrice a month, so the users can follow their personal milk data dynamics over the latest time period, as well as have access to user-friendly interactive graphics. The new tool is based on the Microsoft Power BI analytics platform, which is available for free to iOS and Android users.