Unlocking Potential with Proactive Cow Data

During his first year of using the ear sensor cow monitoring system, Ben mainly focused on learning about the system and how to incorporate the cow data into his daily work.

“I’d heard from people who had it talk about what you can get out of it. But, now that I’ve had it, even what they’ve said, there’s more benefits than that,” he says. He’s hoping that the next season will have further improvements as he learns more about the Nutrition Module. This monitoring module sends users alerts for heat stress, group health issues, feed intake and transition problems.

“I didn’t really want to flood myself with too much information in that first year, but that’s helped hugely with actually watching the cows and how they transition. Some can be right up there with their rumination within five-six days, some might take two-three weeks,” he says.

Mating Made Easier – and Safer

Within the first two seasons of using CowManager, Ben says they’ve found benefits in monitoring cow health, and reducing bobby calves and stress over mating. Mating has been much simpler, and Ben says an unexpected benefit was not needing bulls at all. According to Ben, his staff are safer, his herd is less stressed, and costs are reduced as he doesn’t need to feed bulls.

They’ve been able to target more animals with sexed semen and be more specific with which cows they put to beef, which means they’ve been reducing bobby calf numbers too.

“It’s given us the option to AI all the way through without having to spend ten weeks standing on the AB stand picking cows,” he says.

In New Zealand CowManager is supplied and supported locally by CowManager NZ. This makes a huge difference for Ben, who loves the collaboration with the team.

“They’re a really good team. Any issues they pick up the phone or they’re back in touch within the day. I had issues with my computer through mating, and they were out here first thing in the morning, worked out it was the computer, and had a new computer set up within four hours. You can’t fault that. If I can’t work it out, I know they’re a phone call away.”

Farming Proactively with Actionable Alerts

Ben experienced first-hand how CowManager can help you practice proactive farming through health alerts. The module catches diseases early and tracks recovery in close detail. After getting a health alert for a cow and thinking it couldn’t be right, Ben found that same cow down just a couple of hours later.

“I thought I knew better, turns out I didn’t. So, from then on it was like, okay I’ll listen to you,” he says.

Since then, he has turned from reactive farming to proactive farming using CowManager alerts to stay ahead of health issues before they become costly and time consuming.

“I probably do bag slightly more cows than I used to. I’ll just look through CowManager and if there’s anything that looks like it’s going to go down, they’ll just get a bag under the skin, and it just takes away any issues I have. Very, very seldom do I have a cow down.”

Ben says the cost of treating more cows to prevent them from going down is nothing compared to the cost savings in time if you have to put those cows in hip lifters.

“I only had one I had to lift with the hip lifters this season. That’s a huge thing, but even using more bags is cheap in the scheme of things than if you have a down cow and you’re having to spend five hours with her a day.”

An Invaluable Extra Hand

Another thing the system has helped with is staffing, particularly around mating time when having enough staff is critical. The Auto Drafting functionality and Fertility Module are his main mating tools and help keep mating going, even if there’s a staff issue.

“You can have that ability where if you do have someone sick through mating, your cows still get drafted, everything gets done still. It helps hugely with that side of things,” Ben says.

More than anything, Ben says that a valuable part of the system is the time that it saves, and he’s excited to keep adding on to what he’s already learned in the next season with the system.

When asked what he would tell another farmer considering CowManager, Ben says: “Don’t hesitate. What you get out of it is invaluable, it’s unreal the data you get.”