Bulling

A speculative matchmaking platform for bovine breeding, developed in collaboration with Kathleen Berthus and Niels Postma.

The modern dairy industry in the Netherlands is centered around fully automated stables where the cows’ health and reproductive cycles are closely monitored. This data is used to optimize the herd, informing a highly digitalized and data-driven breeding process.

Currently, dairy farmers purchase bull semen to inseminate their cows from online databases, making a selection based on standardized criteria. While a compatibility algorithm recommending matches might actually simplify this process, the promise of sparks flying when two compatible data sets are found reveals the extreme abstraction that defines the mating ritual of contemporary cows.