A free cloud-based service commissioned by John Deere and DeLaval is aiming to help dairy farmers improve the efficiency of their operations.

Up until July this year, the Milk Sustainability Center was available only to a select number of pilot farms, but it has now been rolled out in 13 countries, including the UK.

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It aggregates data from multiple pieces of software into a single place so farms can make better use of the information, as well as monitor nutrient use efficiency (NUE) and carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e).

Manual data entry is kept to a minimum, with the tool able to pull in information automatically from 30 or so pieces of herd, milking and feeding software.

For any services that can’t yet be connected, it is possible to add data the old-fashioned way.

Farmers can invite consultants, vets and other specialists to access the platform, as well as give permission for it to communicate with DSM-Firmenich’s environmental footprint calculating SustellTM platform.

Signing up to the service typically takes less than 45 minutes for users to create an account and connect their farm software.

Though funded by John Deere and DeLaval, the tool was developed by Dutch firm Dairy Data Warehouse.

All data added to the system is stored securely and is only available to the user, unless they give permission for others to view it.