Within the framework of the “Agtech for Climate-Smart Dairy” project, the official launch of the LECHECK APP was carried out during the “IICA Digitization Week”.
This event was held on May 20, 2022, at the headquarters of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), in San José Costa Rica, and was attended by authorities from IICA, FONTAGRO, the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock of Costa Rica, INTA Costa Rica, INTA Argentina, the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases, the Agricultural Sciences School of Córdoba University, Argentina; IDIAF Dominican Republic, the Honduran Chamber of Milk and INIA Uruguay. The event is available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExWqIJ0p3dk
This four-year project has been running since 2020 and its goal is to build up new capacities for the dairy production sector in Latin America and the Caribbean. It seeks to implement sustainable management processes aimed at achieving climate-smart dairy farms. It is a FONTAGRO project financed by the Ministry for Primary Industries of New Zealand with the support of the Global Research Alliance. The Project is led by INTA Argentina, and it is co-executed and implemented at IICA (National Institute of Innovation and Transfer in Agricultural Technology) Costa Rica; Argentina (Agricultural Sciences School, Córdoba National University); Honduras (Honduran Milk Chamber, CAHLE); Dominican Republic (Dominican Institute of Agricultural and Forestry Research, IDIAF) and Uruguay (National Institute of Agricultural Research, INIA).
The application is a free and open-access tool that will allow farmers and technicians to identify on the farm good production practices, milk quality, climate change (CC) mitigation, adaptation to CC and balance (difference between GHG emissions and carbon sequestration).
Good Dairy Practices (GDP) are a set of recommendations on practices for dairy farms to get innocuous milk of high compositional (or nutritional) quality from healthy animals, using management practices aimed at achieving production system sustainability from animal welfare, and social, economic, and environmental perspectives.
Livia Negri, the project technical leader, referred to the need to develop these digital tools, stating that “Dairy production digitalization is a process that is just beginning but has come to stay, and will bring about development in the production sector. We believe that it can develop tools, facilitate work, and make working time more efficient for production. These digital tools will enhance process management, facilitate access to information and narrow the gap across sectors.”
“We consider that one of the challenges we´ll have to deal with is that potential users may have different capacities or resistance to adopting these digital tools. Then, we´ll have to work on capacity-building and training processes to enable their use. We should not just sit back and wait for farmers to look for these digital tools, we will have to work on their adoption.”
The training and support work mentioned here is part of a wider process beginning with the tool validation sessions in each of the countries co-executing the project.
