  Identifying dairy cows with infections such as mastitis or cows on
medications is an extremely important task and legally required by the FDA$'$s
Pasteurized Milk Ordinance. The milk produced by these dairy cows cannot be
allowed to mix with the milk from healthy cows or it risks contaminating the
entire bulk tank or milk truck. Ear tags, ankle bands, RFID tags and even iris
patterns are some of the identification methods currently used in the dairy
farms. In this work we propose the use of NIR images of cow$'$s mammary glands
as a novel biometric identification modality. Two datasets, containing 302
samples from 151 cows has been collected and various machine learning
techniques applied to demonstrate the viability of the proposed biometric
modality. The results suggest promising identification accuracy for samples
collected over consecutive days
