Dairy farming these days is all about the numbers game. Just like any good business, nailing those numbers is key to building a sustainable operation.
For many Australian dairy farmers, CowManager has been a game-changer.
This has been the case for David Cook, Rob Mortlock and Jason Burleigh.
The ear sensors keep tabs on their herd’s health, their nutrition, reproduction and how they fair during the transition period.
It’s like having their own digital farming assistant, making work on-farm more efficient, and life that much easier.
CowManager is all about working smarter, not harder.
The cow monitoring system monitors a cow’s behaviour, (in)activity, rumination time and eating time, as well as ear temperature.
Based on this, CowManager users receive proactive alerts on their phones and computers, staying up-to-date on the health, nutrition and fertility of their cattle in real-time. A rich collection of 24/7 cow data is always at your fingertips, made clear through easy-to-understand graphs.
David Cook, a dairy farmer in south-west Victoria, says: “With CowManager we can step away. Observations are more intermittent. We can grab the phone and trace her history, see if she’s been eating in the past 24 hours; see if it drops off. We can follow the coloured graph and watch. You don’t panic and call the vet. It gives us 24/7 monitoring.”
Rob Mortlock, dairy farming in South Gippsland in Victoria, agrees that CowManager’s cow data is easy to interpret.
“It’s a simple system. With 180 heifers coming into the milking herd this year, it puts pressure on the current milking herd for fertility, mastitis, bad feet and udder conformation.”
CowManager’s Health Module is dedicated to monitoring herd health to catch diseases early as well as tracking recovery. The module not only helps farmers, but veterinarians too.
Users have the option of sharing data with additional staff and remote specialists through the always-included MultiView function. This enables vets to access the entire data history of the cow, from present day all the way back to the date of the ear tag installation.
Rob explains: “Getting a quick, early diagnosis allows us to get straight on to the therapy. When the vets come out to see our sick cows, they can easily check the selected cow’s rumen activity and temperature. The speedy overview of the cow’s health helps to see what could be wrong more accurately and quickly than before we had the CowManager program installed.”
The Health Module allows a sick cow to be detected at an early stage. The animal can then be drafted for treatment one or two days before she shows any clinical signs of illness.
The early warning system reduces sick cows, speeds up recovery and overall means less time out of the vat.
Dairy farmer Jason Burleigh from south-west Victoria says the attention and care for his cows hasn’t changed since using ear sensor technology. Why?
“Because it’s integral to any herd that operators are still constantly keeping a visual eye on their animals. However, monitoring his cows 24/7 with the system has been a great help in catching sick or at-risk cows early,” Jason says.
“We are now able to quickly pick up on any health issues, therefore treating cows before they become gravely ill or sometimes before they even show signs of illness.”
CowManager is distributed by WWS Australia, including local support. For more information, visit: https://www.cowmanager.com/australia/