Every now and then Swiss farmer Christian Oesch gets a text from one of his 44 cows. He is helping to test out a new device that alerts him via text message when is cows are in heat.

The electronic heat detector is the brainchild of several professors at a technical college in the nearby Swiss capital of Bern. It fills a market gap, they say, because dairy cows, under growing stress to produce larger quantities of milk, are showing fewer and fewer signs of heat. That makes it harder for Swiss farmers to use traditional visual inspections to know when to bring on the bull or, in about 80 percent of the cases these days, the artificial inseminator.

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Photo by jeroen bennink