Cold Chain Remote Monitoring System in Dairy Industry- Need of the Hour

This white paper aims to outline the prevalent problems in Dairy Industry in India [12] with respect to Cold Chain and discusses possible & optimal solution. Milk is a highly perishable product which needs to be maintained at an optimum temperature of 4° C for it to remain fresh and maintain its shelf life. There are several losses occurring in entire milk supply chain like mixing of adulterants/extraneous matter at village level, pilferage/mixing at procurement level etcetera. However, loss in milk quality at cold chain level is one such loss in milk supply chain. To address the burgeoning demand for high quality Dairy products in country [4], cold chain for milk is moving closer towards source of production i.e. at the village level, nearer to the farmer. Cold chain [16] must be carefully monitored and managed in order to maintain high quality milk and Dairy products. Due to losses in milk temperature at chilling level and even during transportation, price realization of milk gets reduced. All stakeholders suffer due to lower returns on milk price realization; producer (farmer) gets less price for milk from market [7], end consumer gets low quality of milk and other Dairy products at escalated prices, Dairy Companies gets lesser value for milk sold in market and incurs high capital and operational expenditure on cold chain operations and eventually the entire Nation loses due to weak economic returns and loss of export opportunities.

IoT Hand-held Computing Device over Personal Computer at Milk Procurement center

This document aims to outline the prevalent usage of underutilized personal computer at milk procurement centres which looms with several problems. A milk procurement centre [1,14] for any dairy union is located in the hinterlands of rural area. The main concept of entire procurement centre is to perform some basic operations of milk and farmer analysis by the application stored in system associated with different equipment like milk analyser, stirrer, weighing scale, printer, scanner, remote display unit etcetera integrated with the application. A personal computer is far more computational device which is required in higher end operations (like entertainment, social networking, and data analysis etcetera) [8]. Although, in milk procurement centre it is highly under- utilized and the cost with which it is purchased to deploy at such centres does not serve the purpose. Mostly personnel deployed at such procurement centres are not well equipped enough to manage the application on personal computer resulting in delay of milk procurement process. This not only affects dairy companies, but also dairy farmers who are long waiting twice a day for their milk pouring affects the quality of milk as well as payments.