Hedrich Rivers Bend Dairy
Jenna Hedrich is herd manager at Hedrich Rivers Bend Dairy in Hilbert, Wisconsin. She runs the dairy together with her family. Their 400-strong herd benefits from CowManager ear sensors, enabling remote monitoring and reducing labor.
“CowManager has helped us with a lot of labor. Having CowManager on our mobile allows us to monitor the cows, so we have a list to help us know who to go look for. We’re not walking the pens to go search and check every one of these cows. We know who we’re going to check out, when they went off feed, when they lost their activity, that type of things,” Jenna says.
The CowManager system allows the Hedrich family to keep an eye on cows from anywhere, for example from the fields because they do a lot of cropping. They installed CowManager three years ago. After investigating several other cow monitoring systems, the user-friendliness and cost-effectiveness of this system and ear sensors won them over.
“We looked at the collars, we looked at ear tags. Pretty much investigated everything that was available out there in the industry. We chose CowManager because it seemed like it was very easy to use, easy to install, very user friendly and just kind of provided a lot of what we were looking for,” says Amy.
One big change since installing CowManager at Hedrich Rivers Bend Dairy is the way of working with the heifers. All the heat detection is done from the monitors which led to a preg rate of almost 100% on the heifers. They don’t use tail paint anymore and strictly focusing on the CowManager heat alerts saved them a lot of labor and costs.