The Muster- Veronica Oostveen: Dairy NZ

Veronica Oostvenn looks at AI and how it has enhanced the dairy sector.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Welcome back to the muster, Veronica, Ousphine of darien Zid,
catch us up once again. Get ave Veronica. How things
been over the past few weeks?

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Hi, how are you?

Speaker 1 (00:18):
You're good?

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Chat bots are all the rage at the moment. Beef
and Lamb's got Bella darien Zid. You've got daisy, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
And actually far actually has one too, But yeah, we've
got We've got daisy that came out a few weeks ago.
That's on our website. So if you go on to
darien zed dot cota and zed at the top of
the little daisy icon, you just tap on that and
then the chat bot will open. We are trying to
get that into more of like an app format, but yeah,

(00:49):
you can put anything you want in there and it'll
come up with a response. Like yesterday, I think I
searched what was the low dcat equivalent to May's silos
and came up with a bunch of answers for me.
So I don't have to remember which technoe I read
what in. I can just put ask it a question
and it comes out with all the resources linked to it,

(01:10):
all the tools linked to it, and any of the
scientific research link to the question that I'm asking as well.
So yeah, just just really handy to not have to
sit down and read and pull through our website because
it's quite it's quite big and extensive.

Speaker 1 (01:22):
I remember having this conversation with Steve Wilkins, I think
it was about two thousand and seven. Get a Steve
if you're listening, and he talked about having picts on
phone and actually taking a photo of something and setting
it through to get identification, and at the time it
was just groundbreaking, but all of a sudden, we see
what we faced was as far as AI and the
likes and certainly a different era.

Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah, definitely like and Steve's spot on. I actually met
Steve last night. He's spot on, like he and I think,
like if we can, if we can get AI to
It's one thing for us to use AI to ask
the questions, but we kind of want AI to give
us the answers that we want. But we have to
be quite creative with the way that we asked the

(02:06):
questions and knowing how to ask the questions that we
want to get the answers to. Otherwise it doesn't really understand,
you know, the context of the question. So the more
information we can give it, the better it's going to
answer our questions, like the more details that we can give.
So I was up at the Precision Dairy conference last
week that was in christ Church that Dairy and Z hosted.

(02:30):
But it's an international conference that moves around every three
years to a different country, and a lot of conversation
about tech AI, what's it, where is it at? Where
is it going to go? And it was just really
interesting to hear that, like, you know, there's Derry's quite
quite advanced with this stuff. Like we've had a lot
of this stuff for a long time, as you know,

(02:51):
Steve was saying, but yeah, like it's just interesting to
hear that, like the amount of data farmers have and
now it's almost to the point that we've been get too.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Much concerns around technology and the evolution of anything in
particular to be worried about. I'm not necessarily talking AI.
I'm just talking across the board.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
I mean, there are a few concerns. I mean, one
thing that I hear quite a bit is I'm sorry,
I don't know how else to word this, but is
this making us stupid? You know, like are people on
farm losing skills? I guess that's the big the big
thing that I hear a lot of times, I think.
And so at this Dairy Precision Dairy conference, a brilliant,

(03:32):
brilliant farmer was on a farmer panel. Her name is
Sean Roscombe. She's also a South and dairy farmer, and
she explained it really well. She was like, you can
have two versions of this. We could have like people
coming to our farms who are very skilled people who
are interested in technology. This next like another generation who
are very interested in this, and we can attract these

(03:52):
people to our farms and they can we can kind
of almost like accelerate our farms with these types of
people coming in and using this data to like better
than I can probably use it because we didn't grow
up with this data on our farms, right. Or we
can have a different route of people that we're trying
to use AI to replace skills. So it kind of

(04:15):
depends on your system and obviously what type of farm
you have and what type of employer you know, employees
that you can get in your geographical location, you know
all this other information. But she was like, you know,
it doesn't have to be negative. You can look at
this as a positive, and I just thought, you know,
like credit to her. She's amazing, and I just thought
that was a really refreshing way to to look at

(04:37):
tech on farms.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yes, certainly was. Hey, good on your Veronica. Always appreciate
your time on the muster. If we don't catch up
next week, you enjoyed the break. We'll see you in
twenty twenty six.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
Okay, thanks Andy, cheers, see.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
It Veronica, a spain of deary and Z. Before we
rap up, Lynn Barry was in studio talking about the
Federative Farmer's Twelve Pieces of Christmas.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
He isn't in memory