FoA 278: Technology for Better Milk and Healthier Cows with Bethany Deshpande of SomaDetect

Future of Agriculture

SomaDetect: https://somadetect.com/

Prime Future Newsletter: https://primefuture.substack.com/

Our guest on today’s show Jordan Lambert actually mentioned back on episode 261. She has a technology that is easily installed in a milking parlor that collects milk data at the individual cow level. Not just on milk quality - which is one big factor, but also on cow health. It turns out, the milk can tell us a lot about how that cow is doing. This way, a dairy producer can see trends in not just their herd as a whole, but also in individual cows.

Bethany Deshpande is on the show. She is the CEO of SomaDetect, which is the company doing all that stuff I just mentioned. Bethany completed her PhD in Biology, and isn’t from a dairy background originally, but started SomaDetect when she saw an opportunity in the industry to apply some technology originally developed by her father. We’ll get more into that background later in the episode.

But she’s certainly dove headfirst into the dairy industry these past five years since starting the company. This is a great profile of what’s possible as we continue to find new ways to both collect data, but really to put it into management practices. I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned here about the future of agriculture, whether dairy is of interest to you or not.

Here is my conversation with SomaDetect CEO Bethany Deshpande.