Three Nexus Innovation Award winners named

Progressive Dairy, in collaboration with Professional Dairy Producers (PDP), recently invited each of the following companies on stage as winners of Nexus Innovation Awards. Each was deemed an award winner by a panel of dairy producers.

These technologies caught the judges’ attention: a bolus administered at dry-off that cuts milk production 50% to 60% in 24 hours, an eartag that monitors calf activity from birth and alerts you when behavior deviates from normal, and a semiautomated milking technology that handles everything from pre-dip to post-dip.

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A 2025 survey found only 7% of New Zealand dairy farmers said reducing emissions would be a major focus on their farms in the next two years, and just 40% planned to use a methane vaccine if one became available. Leaders say this data proves that farmers will need subsidies or other incentives to adopt methane-reducing technologies – at least for ones that don’t improve productivity.

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Being a late adopter of precision technology may ultimately work in the beef industry’s favor. … The rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) could help us build custom dashboards that pull together lots of data from different sources into one easy-to-use screen.
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North Carolina startup OsRostrum has developed BoViPhIT, an iPhone app that uses lidar scanning to create high-resolution 3D models of cattle structural traits in under 20 seconds – no Wi-Fi required.

The app automatically annotates anatomical landmarks and calculates the angles and proportions a livestock judging coach would evaluate, generating shareable PDF reports with QR codes for sale catalogs. Farmers pay only per scan, and the platform includes AI-enhanced analytics to audit herds against custom benchmarks, helping inform breeding and culling decisions with objective measurements rather than subjective visual assessment.

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“The next stage of strategic management on dairies is measuring individual cow costs, especially feed intake and feed cost, so producers can manage each cow’s marginality, not just herd averages. New technologies now make this possible.”
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Projected profitability for the next 12 months for two dairy herd sizes WERE MIXED in recent profit projections from ZISK.

ZISK is a profit projection smartphone app that tracks individual dairy farm profitability based on current CME board prices. Projections for a 1,000-cow dairy producing an average of 80 pounds of milk per cow and a 2,500-cow dairy producing an average of 85 pounds of milk per cow are provided.

12-month dairy farm profit projections (as of May 7, 2026):

1,000-cow dairy = $394,190 (UP about $117,000 in the last two weeks)

2,500-cow dairy = $1.74 million (DOWN about $198,000 in the last two weeks)