Mastitis, a painful inflammation in the dairy cow’s mammary glands, is one of the most wide-spread diseases in the dairy industry, inflicting serious damages on a global scale. In Europe alone, mastitis costs the farmers more than 60 million EUR per year1 and causes very large losses in milk production and degradation in milk quality. In herds without an effective mastitis control program, approx. 40 % of cows are infected every 6 months. Antibiotic usage is currently the only solution for treating mastitis, however, in many cases, this method is ineffective and leads to developing bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. On top of that, global antibiotic use in food animals outweighs human consumption by nearly three times and will rise 53% globally between 2013 and 2030. This scale-up in antibiotics will be devastating to efforts to conserve its effectiveness. Also, because of the inappropriate use of these drugs in animals is a leading cause of rising antimicrobial resistance (AMR). For many years, scientists all over the world tried to find a non-antibiotic treatment against mastitis. Agricam AB has developed a revolutionary technology capable of addressing this problem - a sensor-solution to monitor lactating cows. Our patented heat camera systems (TRL-8) perform over 10 000 analyses daily for large scale and heavy-duty dairy farms in Sweden, monitoring and preventing mastitis amongst the herd 24-7. Our innovation emerged from military Infra-Red camera technology and became a tool to combat mastitis in dairy cows. To-date, Agricam has been installed at 30+ dairy farms in Sweden and one in Russia. The technology has proven its capacity to decrease the use of anti-biotics, bringing measurable economic benefits for the farmers. During this Phase 1 project, we will develop a roadmap to bring Agricam to the European markets.
