The BYU student IT team recently finished as a top 10 finalist in the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition and hopes to win the Imagine Cup People's Choice Award for the software program they created.
The software program they developed helps find a way to track health conditions of livestock.
The team, LegenDairy, finished first in the Windows Azure category which featured students building a web solution powered by the cloud -- a way of remotely storing data over the Internet .
The team of information technology students, Kevin Brown, Whitney Nielsen, Jason Wells and Craig Caro began working on this project for their capstone class in the Fall. With help from their advisor, Chia-Chi Teng, they formed an idea that could flourish with new technology and began developing.
The next step for the team is to win the people's choice award, which gives everyone a chance to vote online for their favorite project, and the winning team advances to the Worldwide Finals in Australia.
The team is currently in fourth place but hopes to finish strong by the May 19 deadline.
Brown said the cloud technology makes the program more available to small and large farms.
'The technology makes it more accessible to more farmers and brings the cost of dairy farming down,' Brown said.
The program tracks each cow with ear tags that can be scanned by a mobile device. Information on the cow, such as how much milk they are producing, can be entered into the mobile device and transfered to the cloud. The program can also track a cow's pregnancy and save that and other health information as well.
The goal of the team was to 'create a solution for monitoring health conditions of livestock in the agricultural industry with the purpose of increasing accuracy of data reports which will lead to increased efficiencies and reduce the cost of food.'
The use of Microsoft tools to synchronize to the cloud and then to mobile devices makes this program easy to use and accessible for farmers, especially out in field.