Iowa Farmers - Are you ready for Fitbits for your cows???

Richard Watson strapped 200 remote-control-sized transmitters around his cows' necks, an artificial-intelligence system named Ida has pinged his phone with helpful alerts: when his cows are chewing the cud, when they're feeling sick, when they're ready for insemination.  "There may be 10 animals out there that have a real problem, but could you pick them?" he said one morning, standing among a grazing herd of dairy cattle wearing what he calls "cow Fitbits."

Other farmers say they aren't that impressed.   They say they can spot a cow across a room that doesn't feel great just by looking in her eyes.

Sophisticated AI technologies are helping reinvent how Americans work, offering powerful software that can read and react to mountains of data and save them time and stress along the way.  The AI that Watson's farm uses - called Ida, for "The Intelligent Dairy Farmer's Assistant" - tracks his cows' tiniest movements through their collars and then graphs and dissects them en masse. Those "real-time cattle analytics" are then used by the AI to assess diet and movement and predict concerning health issues, such as lameness or udder infections.

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