Installing a collar-based monitoring system and automatic sorting gate has improved the health, fertility and productivity of two pedigree Holstein herds, which are run on neighbouring units by one family.
TEXT PAUL JENNINGS
Herd monitoring and automatic segregation is helping one father-and-son team to manage two neighbouring dairy units and keep cow health and fertility on track.
Michael Yates and his father Brian manage a total of 440 Holstein cows, plus followers, under the Logan pedigree prefix, as two herds on ring-fenced units near Castle Douglas in Dumfries & Galloway.
The herds, comprising 280 and 160 cows, are milked three times a day and average yield is 11,500 litres, at 4.23% butterfat and 3.54% protein. Both herds are housed and calve all year round. The main herd at East Logan numbers 280 milkers and the second herd is currently expanding to a target of 200 cows.
“We have sold between 60 and 70 heifers each year in the past, but we’re keeping a few back now to increase the size of the second herd,” explains Michael. “We’ve also sold a few of our older cows to free up space for heifers to enter the milking herd. There’s market demand for milkers at the moment.”
Sexed semen is used on the top cows and heifers in the herd, based on genomic testing, to produce dairy replacements. The rest of the herd is served with beef sires.
“During the past couple of years, our fertility protocols have proved so successful that we’re actually producing too many dairy heifers,” says Michael. “So we’re going to reduce the amount of sexed dairy semen we use from 50% of inseminations down to around 30%, with the difference swapping to beef. At the same time we’ve started using sexed beef semen to produce more bull calves, which are currently commanding prices between £80 and £90 more than beef heifers.”
High fertility
A significant factor in the herds’ breeding programme success and high fertility figures is the installation in January 2022 of a new collar-based heat-detection and health-monitoring system.
Prior to 2022, heat events were detected using pedometers, but this proved to be somewhat unreliable. “We were missing too many silent and weak heats, and were unable to wholly trust the system. So we began looking for an alternative solution,” explains Michael. It was on a Holstein UK trip to Madison, in the US, where he first heard positive reviews about the SenseHub system. “Many of the larger herd managers we met in the US swore by the accuracy and reliability of the system’s collars, but I ended up installing a newer generation of pedometers instead because they were offered to me on a free trial basis.”
Despite being more technologically advanced compared to his first pedometer system, Michael and his herd management team were still missing too many heats, and receiving excessive false health alerts and inaccurate lameness and mobility scores.
Sorting gate: cows that require attention are automatically drafted to
an inspection pen
Pedometer issues
“We were also having to constantly replace failing pedometers,” adds Michael. “The ability to get heifers and cows back in calf quickly and cost-effectively is key to the success of any commercial dairy herd, so I enquired about putting SenseHub’s electronic ear tags into a group of maiden heifers on a trial basis.
“The tags immediately started to spot heat events accurately, and within the first 21 days we’d served all the heifers in the trial group, with all of them subsequently coming back as PD positive.”
Unsurprisingly, he was convinced fairly quickly about the system’s ability to spot heat events so, along with his uncle who runs the neighbouring herd, he ordered 1,000 collars for both herds.
Today, first service conception rate averages 61% for heifers and 29% for cows. Heifer age at first calving is 24.4 months old and the herd’s calving interval is running at 397 days.
Michael, his father, and the dairymen on their two farms all have the SenseHub app installed on their phones and use it daily to assess the health and fertility of cows and heifers, and to determine which, if any, need to be
inspected for a potential health or welfare issue.
“Initially we had to run the two herds as one large group on the system due to a compatibility issue with our parlours. But the company’s technical support team found a way around the problem and we now have the two herds logged separately and can easily transfer data from the SenseHub app and each herd’s parlour into our herd-management software. It’s a quick and easy way to keep each and every animal’s records up to date and makes paperwork simpler and more accurate.” In addition to using the system for heat and health detection, the collars are also used to control a sorting gate, which was installed at East Logan in 2023.
“Our previous drafting gate missed too many cows that were earmarked for AI, so we decided to replace it with a more accurate system,” Michael explains. “With the collars already working well it made sense to install a SenseHub sorting gate as it is fully compatible with the app that we use to automatically segregated animals for insemination or health-based reasons.”
To date the gate has proven to be 99% accurate at drafting cows as they leave the parlour and, as well as ensuring individual animals are presented for AI at the optimum time, it reduces stress to staff and livestock. “It also cuts the amount of time we spend looking for those one or two cows that the previous gate would have missed and bringing them back out of the cubicles to be served. It’s like having a third person on hand at each milking and is now a vital part of our cow handling and herd management infrastructure,” adds Michael.
Sorting gate
The collars and sorting gate also work together to identify and segregate any cows that are displaying irregular behaviour patterns or activity levels that could indicate an underlying health issue.
“By detecting an underlying problem before any physical symptoms become apparent, we can intervene and treat cows much sooner,” he says. “It also means that instead of having to default to antibiotics to treat a problem that has gone unnoticed, we can get ahead of any infection before it becomes too serious and administer pain relief that helps the cow to get better on her own.”
Michael adds that the system paid for itself soon after it was installed. “Just after we began using the system to provide health alerts it flagged up a cow who seemed fine. We ignored that first warning, and a subsequent alert suggested the system had seen a change in behaviour. But we still couldn’t see anything untoward, “It wasn’t until the app raised a third alarm that we realised she had developed a twisted stomach. Our vet managed to operate on her successfully, but that it taught us to trust the health alerts and we now keep a much closer eye on any animals that the tech highlights,” he says.
“More often than not it has spotted something we haven’t and, by pairing the app to the drafting gate, we can easily segregate any animals that need to be looked at or treated.
“It’s a more reliable way of keeping the herd in prime condition and makes managing our day-to-day workload much less stressful.”
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