Highlights from Members’ Visit to Dairymaster

IRDG member Dairymaster has benefited from the services that IRDG offers in terms of R&D and collaboration. See highlights of our Innovation Practice Group visit to their site, and read their story below.

Dairymaster, which employs 350 people, operates from its headquarters in Causeway, Co. Kerry as well as having operations in the UK and USA. Founded in 1968, it exports to 40 countries in five continents. Dairymaster has been identified as one of the key players in Ireland’s IoT ecosystem and has won numerous innovation awards for the new developments it has introduced to the dairy industry. It has pioneered advances in such areas as milking parlour equipment, automatic scrapers, automatic cow feeding systems and farm management software.

In order to sustain its global leadership and grow its markets, Dairymaster has consistently invested in R&D. This investment is at a multi-million euro level, both inhouse, and through collaboration with external research partners. Dairymaster has collaborated with a number of higher education institutions and also with Technology Gateways and Technology Centres on Enterprise Ireland supported Innovation Partnership projects. Dairymaster has also collaborated at a European level in a panEU research consortium through the FP7 framework. Dairymaster has recently agreed a major SFI supported R&D programme with IT Tralee and LERO, the Irish Software Research Centre. The objective of the research is to further develop Intelligent Autonomous Systems and IoT technology for dairy farming, with a number of researchers at PhD and post-doctoral level based in Causeway working on autonomous systems, data analytics and sensor development.

This sustained investment in R&D, both in-house and through collaboration, has resulted in significant sales growth and employment, and has positioned Dairymaster as a technology leader in the dairy equipment industry.