An AI camera in a County Antrim milking parlour is helping the McMaster family spot lame cows in their 300-strong herd much earlier

George McMaster’s farming career began with milking eight cows in a byre, and his own eyes were the health check. The family herd near Islandmagee in County Antrim now numbers 300. Lameness, often from painful foot lesions, is a major welfare problem in dairy farming, and the early signs are easy to miss in cows you see every single day.

The clever bit

Let a camera watch every cow walk, every day. The CattleEye system in the McMasters’ milking parlour gives each cow her own ID, records a short video of her daily, analyses how she moves and flags changes, often before they are visible to the human eye. George’s son Jack, who is taking over the farm, signed up when a local developer approached him. George now checks the herd on his phone.

Jack says the camera flags cows the family would never have thought of as lame, and much earlier, so they can check them before they lose condition and get sick. The system has also been tested by vets. In a 2023 University of Liverpool pilot study on three dairy farms, its mobility scores largely agreed with two experienced vets, and it caught 52% of cows that turned out to have painful foot lesions, against 29% for one of the vets.

There’s cows there we would never have thought of as lame when we were just watching them every day, but whenever the camera’s watching they’re picking them up so much earlier.

— Jack McMaster, dairy farmer, McMaster family farm, Islandmagee, County Antrim, via bbc.com

Hooray

Sore cows on the McMaster farm get looked at sooner, before a limp turns into a sick cow. Jack’s reasoning is simple: healthier cows give more milk and are happier, and happy cows make happy farmers. For George, a third-generation farmer, it is “absolutely incredible to move from all hand-done to sitting on the phone, watching what’s happening outside.”

What comes next

Jack is taking over the farm with the camera already part of the daily routine. Other Northern Ireland farmers in the same BBC report are moving the same way, from robotic milking in County Tyrone to apps that keep every cow’s records in one place. Gareth McDonald, who built one of those apps, says the AI should advise farmers, not make the decisions for them.