Much before the dairy cooperative movement took roots in the country, the trail to milk revolution was set ablaze by Babasaheb Chitale .The journey began in 1939, in the small town of Bhilwadi which set the stage for a revolution in the country’s dairy industry. Babasaheb, along with a group of farmers, procured buffalo milk from the adjoining areas of his hometown, which was pasteurized mechanically and dispatched for sale.
Sachin Wagh, a regular supplier of milk since last eight years from Sangli district in Maharashtra is an empowered farmer of Chitales. Sachin owns 20 cows which are tagged with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) labels on each ear which, when scanned by the RIFD reader, transmit information about each one of them back to the data center at Chitale Dairy. RIFD tags are washable and farmers have cellphones to record and track the health and nutrition of the cows and buffaloes, and the amount of milk they produce.
RIFD sends Wagh periodic text messages (in Marathi) that alert him to any specific need about individual cows. A cow, for instance, may be in poor health, may need supplements, or may be about to deliver a calf. SMSs are sent both to Wagh and the veterinarian for action, as and when required.
While Chitale Dairy has been using RFID tags for over a decade to track cows and buffaloes, it also began transmitting the data to improve the productivity of its business, efficiency of the farmers, and milk yield of the cattle over the last couple of years. Vishvas Chitale, director of Chitale Dairy and a third-generation entrepreneur, likes to label the journey as “cows to cloud and IoT (Internet of Things)” since the data is transmitted over the cloud and can be accessed on desktops, while the factory data from the multiple sensors help in “plant automation” and analytics.
At Chitale Dairy, equipment like evaporators, spray dryers, pasteurizers, boilers, chillers, refrigerators and packaging machines are automated by Rockwell Automation. VMWare Inc. has helped Chitale Dairy consolidate its two separate data centers since the dairy faced operational challenges with 10 physical servers spread across two data centers in a town 500 km from the nearest city. Dell Inc. developed a process called virtualization on servers by which two physical operations were consolidated into one virtual data centre. This has reduced Chitale Dairy’s hardware and software acquisition costs and also lowered its power consumption. The dairy also upgraded its network with the help from Dell to support the internal cloud used for the data management needs of its research farm, the monitoring of logistical efficiency and factory energy consumption, and the storage and delivery of unique animal data. This also helped in eliminating delays that impede daily delivery schedule for fresh milk products.
Chitale Dairy is a fine example of Dell’s future-ready enterprise, built on Dell’s future-ready IT foundation and an agile infrastructure that can bridge the gap between traditional and new IT paradigms. Farmers are seeing tangible benefits from the use of technology in these dairies.

Discussion Questions
1. Explain the benefit of using RFID tags for increasing the productivity at Chitale.
2. How is Chitale Dairy using automation in milk production?
3. Explain how VMW are helped in increasing productivity and reducing the costs.
4. Explain how Dell Inc. technology is used in Chitale Dairy.