Estonian Dairy Cluster

Estonian Dairy Cluster

Organisation type: 
Research organisations
Technology institutions
Network / partnership
EU action / network
Food chain
Country: 
Estonia
Short name: 
EDC
Description: 

Estonian Dairy Cluster is an open non-profit association of natural and legal persons. The purpose of the association is to find new opportunities for creating higher value added from the perspective of dairy production and processing chain, improve economic performance of sector enterprises and increase global competitiveness through cooperation and various innovation activities. EDC has 23 members who are legal persons – primarily dairy producers, two dairy industries, one dairy cooperative and a roof organisation of the field, the Estonian Chamber of Agriculture and Commerce.
According to EDC's innovation plan, the cluster contributes to long-term development of the sector in six main areas (export, breeding, feeding, health of livestock, quality of raw milk, and digitalisation) through 18 different development projects.

Selected research partners for its innovation projects have been found by EDC. Each partner contributes to specific project or subproject with their expertise. Since formation EDC has acted as European Innovation Partnership (EIP) group. Currently EDC runs also two EIP cooperation projects, including coordinates cross-border cooperation with Finnish ÄLYREHU EIP group. This is the first instance of cross-border cooperation between working groups of European Innovation Partnership.
In order to keep the development pace EDC actively participates in cooperation and forms new consortias for research and development activities.

Growing labour shortage creates tensions in animal farming. Extensive deployment and development of digital tools represents one possible way for finding solutions. In order to implement the potential, it is necessary to create an automated solution for collection and sharing of health data for dairy farmers and use the combination of these and other data in supply chain. Implementation of collecting health data is an important step towards the development of precision farming technologies. Based on health data of the animals, we can draw conclusions regarding both an individual animal, herd and entire dairy sector (big data). Resulting big data system has a huge future potential, because transferring and automated processing of health data of individual animals essentially allows creating electronic health passport of a bovine animal. Second phase applications include automated herd-specific and population-specific information management and interactions with private sector organisations and public agencies (e-PRIA; Veterinary Supervision, Animal Recording Centre, etc). Resulting savings and new business opportunities derived from compilation and exchange of data can definitely be measured in millions of euros, not to mention providing a solution in a situation, where some things cannot be done due to labour shortage.

International: 
Yes