Okay, it wasn’t that simple. He wanted to talk about “the connected cow.” The story Sirosh tells goes like this: Dairy farmers in Japan approached the Japanese computer giant Fujitsu with a question. Could they improve the odds for successfully breeding cows in large dairy farms? It turns out that cows go into heat, or estrus—their period of sexual receptivity and fertility when they can be successfully artificially inseminated—only for a very short window: twelve to eighteen hours roughly every twenty-one days, and often primarily at night. This can make it enormously difficult for a small
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