Although Bliss Crandall never cared to sit on a three-legged stool, he pioneered a computer software package that revolutionized the dairy industry.
"I wasn't a dairyman. The happiest day of my life was when my brother learned to milk cows on our farm," said the 78-year-old Springville native.He might not know how to milk cows, but Crandall knows how to manage them. Or, more precisely, he knows how to help dairy farmers get the most out of their herds.
Crandall and Lyman H. Rich developed the first computerized system for keeping track of dairy records in 1950 at Utah State University. Four years later, Crandall founded Dairy Herd Improvement Inc. in his basement. He processed health, feed, breeding and quality and quantity of milk records on 17,000 cows.
Today the company, now known as DHI Computing Service Inc., tracks about 850,000 cows in 6,000 herds nationwide. DHI's Provo office is the largest dairy records processing center in the world.
"If you can measure something, you can manage it," Crandall's fond of saying.
Record keeping and data analysis led to better herd management. The average milk production per cow has nearly tripled in the past 40 years and the number of cows has shrunk.
In 1950, 21.9 million cows nationwide produced 116.6 billion pounds. Forty-one years later, 9.9 million cows turned out 148.5 billion pounds. The per-cow average went from 4,622 pounds a year to 14,688 annually during that time, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Computerized records on lineage and performance also help dairy farmers breed genetically superior animals, Crandall said. The National Association of Animal Breeders, an independent organization dedicated to cattle improvement, isolates superior germ plasm and mates the best sires with the best dams.
"That's really what made this record system sing," he said.
Cows and computers might seem to be strange companions, but Crandall said they aren't.
"A dairyman that's trying to be successful and improve his herd needs daily information," he said. "So that made dairy farming an ideal subject for computers." From 1905, when Helmer Rabild, a Danish immigrant, formed the first cow testing association in Michigan, until 1950, dairy farmers kept written records.
Crandall's company also found the savings and loan and health-care industries suited to software packages it creates. Two arms of DHI, FPS GOLD and HPS Gold, process records for 74 banks, hospitals and clinics.
"The systems are very similar. There's not a major system overhaul to go from one industry to the other," said Val C. Thurston, corporate communications director.
Diversity has made DHI a stable company through the years.
"We've never lost money," Thurston said. Gross revenues for the privately owned DHI range between $10 million and $20 million annually, he said.
Even though the DHI has gone some different directions, Crandall, a member of Dairy Shrine hall of fame, hasn't forgotten what got him to the top.
"The dairy cow is a great animal. She'll eat almost anything and convert it into nature's most perfect food," he said.