SHERI for Washington Dairy Farms Sustainability

We have developed SHERI (Sensor Hub for Environment & cattle Ruminant Improvement)- a rugged, low-cost localized weather and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions sensing nodes (ver. 2). These nodes are plug-&-play to form a scalable farm-specific wireless sensing network tied to a web-based decision support platform (i.e., AgWeatherNet [AWN] Smart [Dairy] Farm). This integration enables farmers to quantify dairy farm specific GHGs (e.g., at pen, milking parlor, manure lagoon) and use such data along with microclimate for animal health and production management while meeting sustainability goals. Such spatiotemporal data will aid in incentivizing carbon credits. This project will improve SHERI (ver. 3) and web platform based on prior and on-going field testing/user feedback. Commercialization ready version will be realized for reliably quantifying farm-level emissions, and abiotic stressors (e.g., comfort index). Working with collaborating farms, we aim to either commercialize sensors or develop a for-fee service to be offered through AWN.