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Phone app teaches best practices for moving cattle

Teaching people how to safely move cattle is a little easier thanks to a free training tool. 

Jennifer Van Os is an assistant professor and animal care extension specialist with the University of Wisconsin.  She tells Brownfield a free game application for smart phones helps teach people the safe way to move cattle.  It’s called Mooving Cows, and is being used by new and experienced farm workers. Van Os says, “We had about 14-thousand downloads worldwide in over 100 countries, which is really fun to see. Right now, it’s only available in English and Spanish, but it would be really great in the future if we could have it available in other languages, too.”              

Van Os says university staff, programmers, and farmers worked to make Mooving Cows a realistic training tool. “We had a lot of input all along the way and it was really this collaborative effort, so the game wouldn’t be what it is without that farmer input.”

Mooving Cows was developed with funding from Wisconsin’s Dairy Innovation Hub, and is a free download for Apple and android devices.