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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!”

"Werken met CowManager is eenvoudig en gebruiksvriendelijk"

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, Nederland