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Santiam Dairy in Turner, Oregon, is home to 500 milking cows. The dairy is owned by Chris DeVries and managed by son-in-law Drew Johson. After only 7 months of using the CowManager system they already booked great results.

“I can’t believe how wonderful and easy it is working with these ear-tags. Going through our records, I noticed that our pregnancy rates went up, our death loss down and it saves us a couple of hours of working a day".

The CowManager ear tags monitor the activity, rumination and ear temperature of each cow. This accurate information about a cow’s performance is essential to success in dairy farming. The better you know how your animals feel, the better equipped you are to take the right action at the right time. Adequate intervention will result in higher pregnancy rates, improved lactation, a better health status, and fewer cow losses. CowManager’s revolutionary ear tag provides this information for each individual cow, and fully supports the needs of the dairyman. Resulting in a better performance and a lower work-load.

Before using CowManager, the results of the breeding program were just fine, according to Drew Johnson. However, to maintain the pregnancy rates they needed to use lots of medication. Checking on all the heifers used to be very time-consuming and being short on one man on the team didn’t help our ‘spare-time’ at all.

“In terms of saving time, we used to spend two hours every day chalking tails, watching for heats, and checking fresh cows, but we don’t do that anymore and we’re having better results!

The CowManager system combines data from the ear-tag with a special algorithm, that gives the dairyman accurate health alerts. These health alerts make sure that you can catch an ill cow early. Early detection of the sickness is key for adequate treatment with less and/or cheaper medication. And it can even prevent the milk-production from dropping. According to Drew Johnson, the health alerts from CowManager saved him $8.000 only in medical costs.

“It also saved us time finding and treating cows that are truly sick. You wouldn’t believe how soon the tags pick up illness. Now we save time and $8.000 because we’re only treating cows that need it, and not treating those that don’t.”

“I can’t say enough good about the system! These little tags have really changed the way we do business!”

"Working with CowManager is simple and user-friendly"

Dick and Hetty Laan give their young stock a Sensor at 13.5 months which remains in their ears. At 14 months, they start breeding the heifers. At the moment, they have 250 Sensors in use.

The most important aspect of the system for Dick and Hetty Laan is the Fertility module. "It is nice to have an extra eye on our farm, because of the company size and the amount of work on the field. It’s a practical tool. The results have strongly improved after we started using CowManager. We noticed that some cows are only in heat during the night, we wouldn’t be able to see those without CowManager.

The dairy farmers are also very pleased with the module Health. "It is striking that CowManager indicates cows with health issues so fast. Due to the module Health we can also see an increase in activity half a day before calving.” Beside the activity before calving the they can react faster at sick alerts: “Once we had a sick alert with a temperature notification of a lame cow. Nothing was wrong with this cow during the morning milking, but at the time of the sick alert she was lying in a cubicle fully emaciated. At such a moment it is good to have something pointing that out, so you can act directly.” The module Nutrition is a great practical addition within the CowManager system. "You can see immediately whether the composition of the ration is good or not. This makes it possible to detect deviations in the ration very quickly, because the system shows the feed-factor of the whole herd. It’s nice that we instantly get a notification from cows who don’t eat and/or ruminate enough." "Our daily routine using the system is actually mainly just looking on the CowManager phone app during the breaks.”

Dick and Hetty Laan, The Netherlands

John and Meghan Palmer, the owners of Prairie Star Dairy, Waukon, Iowa milk 120 cows and have 400 acres of crop production along with 200 acres of pasture, with help from their five children. Their milking operation has been certified as organic for several years. In 2015, the Palmers moved into an impressive new free stall barn for improved cow comfort. In December 2016, the Palmer’s purchased a CowManager automated monitoring system with the Fertility and Health modules, which has provided the Palmers with Fertility alerts for cows in heat and Health alerts for cows that appear sick based on a reduction in activity, feeding time and rumination levels. They have SensOors on both cows and heifers.

During the long, cold upper-Midwest winter of 2017-2018, the Palmers were challenged with a spread of pneumonia in their milking cows, caused by the Pasteurella multocida bacteria, which is very contagious and deadly. A common term for this disease in cattle has been termed ‘Shipping Fever’. For the Palmer’s, the value of their investment in CowManager to provide early detection of the pneumonia symptoms was critical in them being able to get early detection of afflicted cows and treat them with organic-approved methods to help maintain their organic status. John Palmer told us that “Initially we had six cows in a sick pen and three of these died despite treatment with antibiotics, but we soon learned based on the data in CowManager, which cows were coming down with pneumonia and we managed to get the rest of the herd through this outbreak. For this issue, the temp alerts available with CowManager were also critical in the diagnosis of cows that needed treatment and was as important to us as the rumination data. Cows that were afflicted didn’t look sick but with a reduction in appetite, declining rumination and elevated temperatures, the CowManager system would flag these cows with a sick alert, which was very helpful.”

Left to right: Faith Palmer, John Palmer and Meghan Palmer.

John also added that “at one time during this challenge, we had 16-17 cows that CowManager identified as being sick with the Health module alerts and using the data available with the system was critical to our ability to manage the treatment process. We only ended up with a few cows that we had to use antibiotics to save, which resulted in these cows having to be sold to a conventional dairy. Without the early alerts from CowManager, we would likely have decided to conventionally treat more cows than we needed to, and that saved us from having to cull a larger percentage of our herd, so having the CowManager system available during this health event was a huge benefit for us.”

Meghan commented on the ease of using the CowManager data; “The CowManager mobile app was very helpful when dealing with this challenge, as we could use it to continually monitor treated cows and look for new cows that showed up on the Health alert list. Once we figured out the pattern, we were able to look closely at the hourly data available for individual cows with the CowManager system to see if the treatment regime was working.”

Dr. David Gibbs is the veterinarian for Prairie Star Farm and had these comments about the value of CowManager to help manage this challenge: “CowManager was an incredibly helpful tool during a Pasteurella pneumonia outbreak at John and Meghan's dairy this past winter. The flagged sick cows would appear fine only to examine them and find 106-degree fevers and very early severe pneumonia. CowManager helped limit the herd damage by identifying sick cows before we could have by simply doing a walk through.”

When discussing their initial investment in CowManager, John said that “We initially purchased CowManager to improve heat detection with the Fertility module, which it has done well but for us the Health module has been a big benefit as well and this incident has made our investment in CowManager well worth it.” Mehgan also summed up their investment in CowManager by saying “CowManager is a great fit for Organic herds. We certainly are grateful for its function in helping us navigate through this situation, but we also love it for its effectiveness in monitoring fresh cows, cows off feed, and heats. CowManager is an invaluable tool to us and has proven its worth through daily use besides this unfortunate event.

John and Meghan Palmer – Prairie Star Dairy

The Tibke family owns a family-farm with 220 cows in Deinstedt (Niedersachsen, Germany). Henry and his sons installed CowManager together with representative Holger Wegner in the spring of 2017.

The main reason to start with CowManager were the flexibility and the labour-saving features of the system. During the harvest season, all family-members are always very busy, so they needed someone who could pay attention to the herd during those peak times. Henry's son Matthias: “With the implementation of CowManager we are much more flexible. In general, it is good to have an extra pair of eyes in the barn.” The German family started up with the module Fertility and the modules Health and Nutrition as a trial. After only two months they decided that these additional modules made their system more complete. “The Health module allows us to perform early treatments. With the hourly graph we can monitor these treatments and check whether the treatment is adequate”, says Matthias. “The module Nutrition allows us to monitor and, if necessary, optimize the effect of a ration change.”

 Matthias Tibke – Deinstedt, Germany

We have been working with CowManager for 3 months now. We already worked with a heat detection system in the past, but since we moved into the new stable in 2014, we didn’t use a heat detection system at all. You can imagine that with 220 cows, the overview of all you cows regarding the fertility and health state could be missing.

We chose CowManager because it shows us 3 totally different modules; Fertility, Health and Nutrition. The module Health displays 24/7 eating-, rumination and activity behavior as well as an ear temperature graph. In case of deviations, the CowManager app will send an alert directly to my mobile phone. In the calving period, the cows can be observed easily. By working with CowManager we can intervene quicker than with our own eyes. Without the heat detection system we would have definitely missed a couple of cows.

CowManager is easy to install and simple to use. Also the application of the Sensor in the cows ear is easy.

Family Scharninhausen, Germany

“To be able to look up any cow, at any time, on my phone and make decisions about her in real time when I am at cow side or at home has been very beneficial to me.”
 

In 2015, Trailside (Fountain, MN) was considering hiring a herdsperson to monitor herd health because there just weren’t enough hours in a day to do a good job. They purchased CowManager instead. Mike Johnson notes, “To be able to look up any cow, at any time, on my phone and make decisions about her in real time when I am at cow side or at home has been very beneficial to me.” After purchasing CowManager, Trailside caught more cows in heat after the VWP, reduced the number of shots they were giving, bred more cows right after the VWP and at the optimal time, and eliminated tail chalking. Mike also notes that with CowManager they are catching more cows in heat at 19-22 days since last heat. Mike believes that using the Health Module in conjunction with the Fertility Module to confirm heats is one of the “biggest benefits” of CowManager. He adds, “With CowManager, early detection of mastitis, fresh cow illnesses and subclinical respiratory infections has been substantial. I am definitely catching the majority of sick cows earlier. In most cases, there is a faster recovery and the cows bounce back sooner.”

“You cannot hire an extra hand on the farm who does the job that the CowManager System does 24 hours a day.”
 

Baas Dairy in Barrhead (AB, Canada) began using the CowManager system in July 2015 in order to improve their reproductive results. “Now we have a constant eye on heifers and cows,” Bert states. Alerts come in at whatever time activity is noticed. Cows are bred 18 hours after increased activity is noted. When they relied on hormones, all cows were bred in the mornings; now they are bred at the most opportune time for conception to occur. Bert states that 85 to 90 percent of the herd is now bred based on a natural heat. “You cannot hire an extra hand on the farm who does the job that the CowManager System does 24 hours a day. We have stopped almost all programming of our herd since using the CowManager System. It’s nice to get them bred at the right time…thanks to the CowManager System.” The family is well pleased with results so far: Not only is this method decreasing the calving interval, but it is time-effective. Bert claims, “In using this system, I no longer have to needle cows every night of the week for timed breeding, so it freed me up to be involved with activities with our kids, which to me is the most important aspect of the system.”