Team:Cornell NY/Integrated Practices

• HOME
• ABOUT
• TECHNOLOGY
  • • WET LAB
    • Bacteriocins
    • Parts
    • Protocols
  • • PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
    • Customizable Shell
    • App
  • • MATHEMATICAL MODELING
    • Modeling
    • Animation
  • • DOCUMENTATION
    • Notebook
    • Safety
• HUMAN CENTERED DESIGN
  • • PRACTICES
    • POLICIES
    • ENTREPRENEURSHIP
    • COLLABORATIONS
• PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
• OUR TEAM

Practices

• Our Story
• Inspiration
• Ideation
• Implementation

Open navigation

Where We've Been.

Our Story.

Cornell iGEM’s multifaceted approach to tackling mastitis is innovative and different, and we know that we could not do this alone. We have spent each stage of our project visiting and interacting with experts in the field, making decisions carefully with the feedback of current dairy farmers in mind. We approached the project with human-centered design in three stages. First: inspiration. We derived our ideas from what the dairy industry lacked in the mastitis-prevention sector. Next: ideation. We sketched out prototypes and brought them to farmers. And finally: implementation. We created our product. And at this stage, we knew that what we had created would be useful, because it was, in essence, the farmer, who had directed us throughout the process.

Timeline: Inspiration Phase

Inspiration Strikes!

• 

  April 28, 2016

  ProDAIRY

  123 Lake St, Cooperstown, NY 13326

  We began our journey by speaking with Caroline Potter and Rob Lynch from ProDAIRY. ProDAIRY is a dairy-education organization in New York State aimed at connecting farmers and members of the agriculture business with valuable resources, research, and information in order to create strong businesses in the dairy industry. During this meeting we discovered that cows infected with mastitis must be taken out of the milking process and are treated with antibiotics in quarantine. Even after a cow is cured, it has to be withheld from milking for several more days until all traces of antibiotics have left the milk. The treatment process and loss of milk is very costly to the farmer, and Caroline and Rob emphasized to us that mastitis is a huge problem within the dairy industry. Through our conversations we found out not only where our treatment and prevention efforts should be focused, but also how big an impact our project could make in the dairy industry.

• 

  May 6, 2016

  Snofarm

  665 Buffalo Rd, Brooktondale, NY 14817

  Next we visited Snofarm, a small dairy farm with 90 cows about an hour away from campus. The owner of the farm, who graduated from Cornell Vet School, strategically met with us during a milking shift at his farm to show us the milking process. Snofarm emphasized how the most intensive part of mastitis was disease prevention. Making sure the cows and their environment were clean is time consuming, but crucial to prevent mastitis. Because of Snofarm's size, antibiotics were a last resort for them, and they preferred helping the cow heal on its own.

• 

  May 7, 2016

  Vet Dairy Teaching Barn

  Shortly after, we visited our first farm located close to campus that not only supplies milk, but that is often used for educational purposes and outreach events. The Dairy Teaching barn is small and milking is done by a few employees. We met with Charles, who showed us the milking process. He told us that mastitis is an “inevitable disease” and that “cows are at risk everyday, so w[they] try to manage that risk.” He informed us about the current methods that he uses to prevent and treat mastitis and showed us what he uses to inject antibiotics into a cow. From our talk with Charles it also seemed that it would be more helpful to develop a prototype that would assist during the milking period rather than the dry period. We saw that during milking, the first bit of milk from the teat is squirted onto the floor as a visual test for mastitis, and decided that we wanted to create something that could better detect mastitis.

• 

  May 13, 2016

  Zoetis

  100 Campus Dr, Florham Park, NJ 07932

  Throughout our process we wanted to work with farmers as well as researchers. Zoetis is one of world’s largest pharmaceutical companies that develops medicine and vaccination for animals. We reached out to Dr. Neubauer, who also happens to be president of the National Mastitis Council, to ask about a collaboration between us. Dr. Neubauer arranged a call-in meeting for us to learn more about our project and pointed the product development team in the right direction for their milking device design.

• 

  May 13, 2016

  Quality Milk Production Services

  240 Farrier Rd, Ithaca, NY 14853

  Almost every research professor on campus that we reached out to pointed us in the direction of the reigning milk quality expert - Dr. Daryl Nydam. Dr. Nydam works at the Quality Milk Production Services (QMPS) located on Cornell’s campus, which serves all of New York State. The QMPS is worldly renowned for its diagnostic services, mastitis prevention programs, and educational assistance. In the past year, the QMPS tested over 170,000 cultures, visited 2600 farms, and consulted with 7500 farmers over the phone. Dr. Nydam encouraged our ideas, and gave us invaluable feedback about the promise of bacteriocins. Dr. Nydam gave us information about mastitis causing pathogens. gram negative and gram positive bacteria, and common and rare species. The rare species are valuable to target because a single outbreak can quickly become detrimental, gram negative pathogens are common because they're environmental, and gram positive pathogens are the most troubling and need to be treated with antibiotics. Taking this information, our wet lab team decided to target a few species in each of the groups when choosing the bacteriocins we would use.

Timeline: Ideation Phase

From just preliminary interviewing, we realized that there was a great need for the prevention and detection of mastitis. We became increasingly excited because our project seemed promising so, we got to work. Our wet lab team chose bacteriocin genes based on the information that Dr. Nydam had provided us. Our product development team focused on the prevention of mastitis and narrowed their ideas down to a multi purpose milking nozzle with interchangeable parts. Our CS/ECE subteam focused on the detection of mastitis, creating an app and a microscope attachment. We brought this sketches to experts in the ideation phase.

• 

  July 15, 2016

  Milkrite

  110 Lincoln St, Johnson Creek, WI 53038

  Milkrite, a division of Avon Rubber and Plastics, works on products for the agriculture industry and is based out of Wisconsin and California. Milkrite is the world’s largest provider of dairy rubber wear, with their core business focused on creating rubber liners which are used in the milking machine. We reached out to Tom Votny, a representative of Milkrite. During our conversation, we learned about the current state of the milking machine market, what technologies had already been developed for shell and liners, how products were typically tested, and how large companies conducted their market research. The insight we gained helped the product development further understand that the direction they are going with the milking shell is feasible, but simultaneously allowed them to find out what other components of the milking machine they would have to consider. We also learned that farmer feedback is essential to making sure that our project as a whole would do well in the market. As a result, we launched into contacting as many farms as we could to garner that feedback.

• 

  July 25, 2016

  Muranda Cheese Company

  3075 NY-96, Waterloo, NY 13165

  With sketches in hand from product development for the milking shell, and outlines of the CS app, we launched into a series of farm visits to garner that feedback that Milkrite had emphasized so strongly. We went to the Muranda Cheese Company located in Waterloo, NY, and talked to Blane Murray, who is in charge of 90 milking cows at the dairy farm. Blane told us that our idea as a whole was valuable because it is a preventative measure for mastitis. We showed him our proposed sketches for the customizable shell with various modules, and he suggested that the most useful modules would be the temperature sensor, UV light, iodine spray, and cooler. With respect to our app, Blane said that bigger and more technologically advanced farms would find it more useful. One important point that Blane pointed out about marketing our product to farmers was its cost effectiveness. Farmers want to know that our device works, and whether they are going to get a return on their investment. Throughout the farm visit as we were explaining our ideas and he was providing us with feedback, Blane was highly interested in trying our product once we built our prototype. With these suggestions in mind, we went back to make improvements on our product idea and app before reaching out to two very different farms that Blane had referred us to.

• 

  July 28, 2016

  Quality Milk Production Services

  240 Farrier Rd, Ithaca, NY 14853

  At this point, it had been nearly two months since our last visit with Daryl Nydam of Quality Milk Production Services. He had given us a plethora of valuable information while we were still in the beginning stages of the project, so we chose to go back and talk to him again once our ideas were more fleshed out. We talked to him about the progress of our bacteriocin research, and Dr. Nydam lent us a field guide for mastitis that gave us a solid foundation of how we should move forward with bacteriocin testing. He also agreed to provide us with infected milk samples that we could use as test targets, and genomic preps of Lactococcus lactis and Bacillus subtilis, two promising bacteriocins that required genes too large to synthesize. We then spoke to Dr. Nydam about the milking shell that we were developing for the milking machine to aid in the prevention of the disease. He particularly liked the iodine spray, UV light, and cold shock modules. He thought the idea of the cold shock was extremely innovative, but suggested that we talk to more experts to discover if physiologically it would work. No research seems to have been done on the temperature that would be required to achieve the cold shock. We also spoke to Dr. Nydam about our ideas for the app we are going to give to farmers. He referred us to research articles he had read that would help us with the economic analysis of treating or culling a cow. He told us to refer to the published scientific literature for the most accurate descriptions to be used for CowMD, but that the symptoms for each type of mastitis often blur together so a search engine taking inputs of symptoms would not be useful. In addition, he was fascinated by the somatic cell counter and urged us to further pursue that option. While there are tests like the California Mastitis Test that already allow farmers to quickly detect mastitis, this new innovation could change the way the disease is approached and dealt with by farmers. Dr. Nydam praised us for choosing a project in the dairy industry because of the strong agricultural presence in New York, along with the connections that Cornell has. Overall, Dr. Nydam emphasized something that everyone we have met has said: farmers want ease and effectiveness. Throughout the rest of the creation process, we kept that in mind through the rest of our project.

• 

  August 1, 2016

  Windstott Farm

  839 Indian Field Road, Genoa, NY 13071

  The first farm recommended to us by Blane Murray that we visited was Windstott Farm, located in Genoa, NY. This farm was unlike other farms that we had been to, because it was a robot farm, and we were beyond excited to gain a different perspective on the needs and processes carried out at traditional dairy farms. We spoke to Bill Kilcer, the owner. He implemented robotic milking machines around 7 years ago for his farm of 130 cows. Robot farms require very little human interaction - cows step into the machine as they need to, and sensors detect the teats before latching on. We watched the process and noticed that the iodine spray was automatically sprayed after milking, unlike other farms where a person had applied it manually. Bill told us that our idea of having a temperature sensor, flow rate sensor, iodine spray, and indicator as part of the shell was already incorporated into the robots. He also said that our app would not be as helpful for him because all the data that the milk samples are tested for, such as conductivity, temperature, and amount of fat and protein, is already stored into the computer. This valuable feedback made us realize that our idea would be most helpful for bigger traditional dairy farms.

• 

  August 2, 2016

  Scipio Springs Dairy

  2049 Mosher Rd, Union Springs, NY 13160

  We were thrilled to schedule our next farm visit to Scipio Springs Dairy in Scipio Center, NY because it was very different from the previous two farms that we had visited. Scipio Springs Dairy is a much larger farm with 800 cows and is set up like a traditional milking parlor, with 12 cows in parallel with one another. We met with Bill Morgan, who looks over the operations of the dairy farm, and the herd manager of the farm, allowing us to get a more well-rounded feedback on our wet lab, product development, and app components of our project. Bill was extremely interested in implementing bacteriocins on his farm instead of using traditional antibiotics. He was impressed by our modular idea for the shell because he believed that it was an all-encompassing prevention to mastitis. Bill believed that the UV light would be a great alternative to the traditional use of heat because heat changes the functionality of the proteins in the milk as well as the milk’s flavor. He also liked the idea of the temperature sensor because gram negative bacteria mastitis typically causes an increase in temperature. Using a temperature sensor would be better than the conventional way of finding out that the mastitis is caused by gram negative bacteria visually because by the time the cause is found, the damage to the cow and its milk is already done. Overall, Bill Morgan was supportive of our idea, and was interested in trying out our prototype and app once we finalized them.

• 

  August 4, 2016

  Dairy One Co-op Inc

  720 Warren Rd, Ithaca, NY 14850

  Dairy One is a dairy data management company that assists farmers in making decisions on their farms. Blane Murray from the Muranda Cheese Company uses Dairy One’s services, and referred us to the company. We spoke with John Tauzel and James Zimmermann primarily for feedback on our app. Dairy One supported the Somatic Cell Counter idea for its innovative idea and convenience. For the cost calculator, they noted that calculating the overall profit/loss of the farm rather than looking at individual cows would be more beneficial. They suggested that the cow data show the effectiveness of the farmer’s practices, so that the farmer can review productivity and make long term decisions.