The overall winner of the AXA National Dairy Innovation Award was Oldcastle, County Meath based LvLogics.

LvLogics’ Silospi product, which is an internet-of-things sensor measuring quality and quality of feed bins, had earlier won the Blacknight sponsored Technology category.

The awards were announced by Ivan Yates as part of the Virtual National Dairy Show.

The winning low cost IOT connected silo monitoring system provides data to farmers on their phone or laptop.

The real time data incorporates information like the levels, temperature and humidity of the meal in the silo or meal bin.

Email alerts can be sent to the farmer (and/or the meal supplier) at predetermined levels, to ensure that the farmer never runs out of meal.

It has a number of benefits including health and safety as the need to climb silos to inspect levels is eliminated

Another benefit is the monitoring and assurance of the quality of meal by monitoring temperature and humidity.

This also includes the assurance that feed never runs out and the animal welfare benefit of a quality feed source always available.

An environmental and supply chain benefit through monitoring enables the mill to plan the efficient and more sustainable delivery of meal through a connected network.

Barry Finnegan of LvLogics reacted to his win by saying “I’m blown away, especially with the people, the judges and the calliper of companies involved in this competition. It’s an honour to be given this accolade”

One of the seven judges on the judging panel, Kathleen Lonergan Erickson of UCD, spoke live about the winner at the virtual awards presentation “Together the judges were impressed with LvLogics Silospi's innovative capability and capacity.”

“By replacing the need for farmers to psychically monitor feed bins, it also gives useful data that benefit the farmer and the feed merchants or mills.”

“It also benefits the stock by ensuring the quality of the feed supply and also ensuring that feed never runs out.”

“Overall, it is a positive innovation contributing to the health and wellbeing of people, animals, businesses, economy and the environment.”

“The winners have the tech and high standards to back it up, congratulations.”

In the Technology award, sponsored by Blacknight Solutions, Marteye’s On-Farm Dairy Sales was runner-up to LvLogics.

Marteye provides software for real time auctions that now offers farmers the ability to engage with live auctions throughout the Republic and UK for on-farm sales.

The Gold winner in the AXA National Dairy Innovation Engineering Award, sponsored by ACE: Agritech Centre of Excellence, was Unison, Smart Microdairy with a self-contained micro-dairy processing unit.

The Smart Microdairy innovation provides dairy farmers with a milk vending machine which allows them to sell their milk directly to customers.

The units are fully enclosed hygienic pasteurising rooms that include everything a farmer needs to process milk with no manual operation required and are also fully compliant with the Department of Agriculture standards.

It complies with all regulation, means no extra food hygiene personnel are required as its an enclosed system and is available in modular units for cost effective pricing.

The Silver winner in the same section was the new Terra NutriTech Orbvie mobile water through mineral dispenser.

This mobile automated mineral dosing system that can be controlled through the farmer’s app on their phone. It will allow farmers to select a specific dosage rate for any number of animals and it works without piping or electricity.

The Gold winner in the science section, sponsored by AgriInsider, was Farmeye’s Soilmate App. The App uses GPS and barcoding to geo- tag the location of a soil sample sent to the laboratory for analysis.

It removes much of the manual labelling and human error involved in the process and provides a digital, map-based system to manage soil data.

The Silver award went to Norbrook’s new Calcitrace P Liquid. The product is a 500ml liquid dietetic feed supplement for the reduction of milk fever and subclinical hypocalcemia in dairy cattle.