The Moos Room™

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Brad Hines: Welcome to The Moos Room. Today, it's just me, Brad Hines, by myself. Decided to record one myself. Today, talk a little bit about precision technology. I get a lot of questions from farmers, "What technology should I use? How should I use it?" We're going to maybe talk a little bit about what we have here at our dairy and what I've been working with for the last 10 years on cow monitors, calf feeders, you name it.
First, I'll provide a real-world update for those that you might be interested, you might not. Some of you know, in 2020, I milked a cow for five months, supposed to calve in December 2022. She did, she calved with a dead heifer calf, then thought she had milk fever, and an hour later, she had passed away. A sad situation, I lost the cow and a calf. She maybe tore something during calving inside that caused her demise.
Unfortunately, this professor also has real-world animals and issues that happen with that, but we forge on and I have a heifer calf out of her, it's a yearling. We'll keep moving on with the show string and having fun that way too. Anyways, kind of leads a little bit to precision technology and monitoring health of cows and what we do. I had a few questions from farmers.
I wrote an article for Progressive Dairy in September about precision technologies that we've been using on our dairy and what might be out there for farmers. Talk a little bit our journey on what we have. We have a lot of technologies here on our cows. By no means, am I going to promote one over the other. I think there's lots of reasons why a farm would choose one technology over the next.
Really, what are you going to do with it? What sort of level of trust you have in the system? What you have for labor, your facilities? Are you grazing? Are you in confinement? I think there's just a lot of different reasons why you might choose one sensor over the other. I had a question from a farmer about wanting to replace his system. We talked through about what his options were and where he might go with activity monitoring systems.
That's really how I got into it was activity monitoring. 10 years ago, these systems were being used for activity and rumination monitoring and they do so much more than that today. That's what we started with. I actually started with the SCR collars. Now it's Allflex system, SenseHub monitoring system. I started with the SCR collars a long time ago. I think we put them in in October of 2013, so 10 years ago, we've been using that system.
I'd say, it worked well. Obviously, we had some issues at the beginning because we were a grazing herd and it was maybe during the summertime was recording a lot of high activity when we switched pastures, when there was lots of flies, heat stress, you name it. It might not have worked as well on pasture as what it did when our cows were in confinement. I think we worked with the company and helped adjust our algorithm. It does much better now on pasture.
That system had collars, it still has collars today but they also have an ear tag system. I still have collars on every single cow. Some farms bought it and were switching tags, collars on cows, depending on who they were breeding, and would take them off during the dry period. I've just left them on. It's a lot less maintenance to do that. Just a few months ago in November of 2022, I made the jump to the SenseHub ear tags.
I started putting them in heifers for breeding purposes. We'll talk about another system that I've had in breeding heifers as well. I thought I'd give this a try to see how well it does with breeding our heifers. We've had, so far, good luck with it. Detecting heats, it detects activity and rumination obviously. With heifers, I'm more interested in it from a breeding purpose than I am anything else and I think it's doing well.
Our heifers are about three-quarters of a mile from our milking parlor where we have a lot of the activity computers and stuff. We are able to see those heifers in real time on our computer and then be able to get semen together and go down and breed those heifers without having to rile them up or go down and look to see who's in heat and then run back and forth. It's been a great way to save labor.
We started with the collar system on SCR. Like I said, it's worked well. Then in 2015, I got the cow manager tags. Cow manager is an ear tag system. I like the idea of ear tags. Sometimes it was the maintenance on the collars was a lot of work. Trying to replace collars and if they died-- the first generation of collars didn't last very well in our harsh wintertime conditions, but we use them and published a lot of good research off of those collars and still do today.
I switched to the ear tags to see how well they worked, how well they worked on pasture, used them for breeding purposes. I also like the idea that they had solar router receivers that I could put in pastures so the cows didn't have to return to the milking parlor to download the data which in our SCR system, we had a long-distance reader, but cows sometimes were too far away.
Right now with the cow manager system, I have about 12 solar receivers. They're all around our pasture and they work well.
I like them on-- we've put them on heifers before. Our heifer pastures are two miles from the milking parlor and I can beam the data back all that way. It's really been a labor saver for breeding our heifers when they're on pasture and it's worked quite well, worked really well for breeding purposes on our heifers. Some of you have-- shout-out to Glenda Pereira at the University of Maine. She's the one that had validated the cow manager on pasture.
We did that research here and Morris. Did well for rumination. Maybe the activity was not quite as accurate on pasture. There's some improvements on their algorithm that needed to be done on pasture as well. It's worked much better. Obviously, it does work very well in a confinement-type system in the wintertime when our cows are in confinement. It provides lots of information.
Activity, does eating time, rumination, and it also does body temperature. Skin body temperature. This is an ear tag in their ear. If I look at it today, it's just above zero degrees here in Morris, Minnesota.
The ear temperature of our cows right now is reading at 40 degrees. It's reading just above ambient-- a little bit above ambient air temperature that can be used to detect health issues in cows. I like it to look at rumination. It's really helped us detect some issues in our herd. The SCR system has done that as well. I love the rumination of these systems because we're able to find issues with feed or if a cow is sick a little bit earlier than seeing maybe clinical signs or it's like, "Oh, she's down in milk today. What's going on?"
We're able to pick those up a little bit earlier. We're not going to pick them up a few days before that. You might on some cows, but we're able to pick those up and go, "Rumination's off in this cow. What's going on? We need to go check her and see what's happening." It's been, I think, a lifesaver in some cows to be able to see what's happening in those cows based on rumination and activity.
We use this for breeding purposes too. We use both cow manager and SCR right now for activity detection in for breeding of our cows. That's where we went with those two systems. In 2018, I won't talk much about this system, but we acquired a Smartbow system in our cows. It's now a Zoetis product, it doesn't get used very often and there's maybe a few herds that are still using it in the US. We used it. It's another ear tag system where we're able to detect activity and rumination of cows.
We validated it on pasture, again, Glenda Perrera validated that on pasture and showed it did very well for grazing detection of cows. I thought it was it also did real-time location of cows, so I think that maybe it was a little bit ahead of its time, but I think those systems are coming, looking at being able to ID cows and find them, whether they're in free stall barns or on pasture or wherever it might be.
Real-time location is something that's at the forefront. I do like that ability in sensor systems, it's just we have this system and don't use it much anymore which is too bad. Another one that we've had, and I've had discussions with farmers lately about these because it's being a little bit more marketed in the US is called SmaXtec. It's a rumen bolus that gives you the cows in their mouth and goes into the rumen reticulum area.
This does some of the same things that some of these other sensors do. It detects activity, it detects rumination on cows. One thing that we used this sensor for of our cows was to detect heat stress. We used it in a research setting where graduate student Kirsten Sharp used these to detect heat stress and shade in cows. It's interesting this bolus now can look at drinking and when cows drink in our herd.
It is really interesting that all of these sensors do something different obviously. This one has a long-distance reader too where I can read cows on pasture. We'll certainly be looking at SmaXtec boluses of cows on pasture this summer. We're going to be doing some research in a grazing situation to see how well they do. I can look at a cow here as an example. I can see that she had four drinking events during the day.
It looks at the internal body temperature of a cow and determines obviously when the temperature goes down, looks like she was having a drinking event, so she was drinking water. A cow, they have a couple of big drinking events during that time period. This one also does rumination. Our average rumination from SmaXtec today is 496 minutes is what our average rumination is from SmaXtec.
On account manager, it's about 500 minutes. I'd have to look at-- it's about the same on the SCR system. They're all pretty consistent. Obviously, they're not exactly the same because they're all algorithms are a little bit different, but they're all detecting the same thing. I do like this one because it looks at internal body temperature. I like to see that in what our cows are doing, looking at heat stress, things like that.
It is very interesting to see the internal temperature of our cows and where we can look at drinking cycles, we can look at heat stress. Really, I like it from a heat stress stand period to be able to see this. There's a downside to all of these systems. They're not perfect. This one, you put a bolus in an animal and when they leave, well, you can't retrieve that bolus. It's just gone.
Sometimes that's hard for farmers to stomach that you're going to put a sensor in a cow and you're not going to get that money back, whereas the collars or tags are reusable. It's another good one, we're going to be exploring that a lot more with some students this summer and really seeing what the SmaXtec system might do. In 2019, I got some money from the University of Minnesota here, internal money to upgrade our milking parlor.
That, we put in Afimilk System with AfiLabs. That has a pedometer with it. We have used it a little bit for breeding purposes on pasture. It's supposed to do quite well. It's a leg tag that we can use for detecting activity in cows. It also detects number of steps, some of our cows during the summertime are walking 50,000 steps per day. How would you like to walk that much a day?
I think we'd be all tired. The neat thing about this system is it detects inline fat, protein, lactose conductivity while the cows are milking. It can help us in detection of ketosis, mastitis, or ruminal acidosis, what's going on in those. We've used that quite a bit in detection and I like it to be able to look at fat and protein and detect those cows, especially after freshening.
We can detect fresh cow diseases or fresh cow problems pretty quickly in this milking parlor situation where we can see fat and protein or we know that something's going on with these cows right away when we're looking at daily milk. These systems are expensive. It's a lot of money to be able to do that, and not every farm can do that, but these things are gaining in popularity just for the sheer amount of data and animal health information that they certainly provide.
We also have an automatic calf feeder. It's a Holm & Laue CalfExpert. Why did we go with Holm & Laue when there's so many other systems out there? Simple fact is not many people had it, and I wanted to try something different. I didn't want to do the same thing that everybody else was doing, which I know is a shocker that I would do something different than what everybody else is doing. We've had this calf feeder for five years now and we've used it on and off.
Obviously, a lot of people know about our calf project and so we haven't used it a little bit in a few years with heifer calves. We've used it in bull calves, but it's done quite well. It's a labor savings possibly in our system. I think it's a different management to be able to have an automatic calf feeder. Some people love them, some people don't like them. I like them enough that I would put all of our calves on them one day on an auto feeder.
From our management situation, it just makes sense being able to eat as much milk as what we want or try different things. I think the future is going to be on some farms with automatic calf feeding and no doubt they are expensive ways to feed calves. By no means should everybody have one of these. [laughs] It comes with its challenges as well and I like it but sometimes it can be a headache.
It does grow nice calves, it grows nice calves and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about calf feeding and auto feeders. Maybe we'll do that one day with something else, but we do have an auto feeder and I do continue to use it and it does work well. I have another calf monitoring system, it's called Futuro Calf System. It's for individual calf housing. If you have individual house calves, you can still monitor them.
It gives a lot of information on activity and risk of disease for these animals. We've had this for maybe a year now. We're monitoring it, looking at it, seeing what it's doing, how well it's working with our calves at about picking up activity and things like that. There'll be some future studies with this system. There is ways to monitor calves in an individual housing situation and this is not a sensor that goes on a calf or anything, it goes on a panel, wire panel, or anything out front so it can detect motion and movement of calves.
It's an interesting new concept of calf monitoring and it's from Europe most of these systems that we've had. It'll be interesting to see what comes of this and for monitoring individual calves because individual calves need monitoring too. We've moved calves into a group housing situation more and more here, but there are ways to be able to monitor those calves.
The question I get to is so what's the up-and-coming sensors? What's Brad going to try next? Where are we going? Well, some of that has to do with unmanned vehicles, so autonomous vehicles in pasture for herding of cows. Can we use an autonomous unmanned vehicle to herd cows from pasture? They've done some of that in Australia a lot for herding of cows with robots, things like that. We're trying to move into that realm and see if that works for herding of cows in our situation.
The new thing that I'm seeing is virtual fencing. Being able to have a virtual fence for your cows so they wear a more than likely a collar and you set up a boundary. A virtual fence can keep animals inside so you don't have to set up all these break fences or different fencing systems with cows so it's interesting. There's a few of those situations. One is called NoFence from Norway, there's another one called eShepherd from Australia, Halter from New Zealand, Vence which is owned by Merck here in the US.
There's some new things coming from the virtual fencing realm and I don't have one of those here. I would like to get one of those, so if anybody's listening would like to work with me on a virtual fencing system, I'd more than like to do that to see how well they work. I can help farmers decide whether when they get to that point of virtual fencing to see if it actually makes any sense.
Another one is looking at satellite images to determine forage quality and forage availability. This can be for grazing farmers also trying to do some things with alfalfa fields. We can determine biomass, or pasture quantity by looking at satellite images from a satellite. I had a graduate student just finish her master's degree looking at this. For a couple droughty years it works well. It's got some nuances that we're still looking at and trying to figure out but it provides some interesting information.
Being able to estimate pasture forage quantity from a satellite that's flying around above us is kind of interesting. It's also meant trying to determine NDF, so digestibility of alfalfa so we can determine the optimal time for cutting alfalfa. Wouldn't that be cool if we can estimate NDF from a satellite and determine when the exact time is that we can cut alfalfa for harvesting for cows. That's cool.
We're going to be trusting a little small little project here and see if we can get some NDF measurements on our pastures and do some clippings and see what we can get. It's interesting in that realm. Those are the things that I see coming using satellites, virtual fencing, and unmanned vehicles in the technology world. We've gone full circle from activity monitors and wearable sensors on cows to now talking about lots of other technology to save labor.
Really, I think that's the big thing is being able to save labor on dairy farms with these monitoring systems. They're exciting, I still continue to work with them I want to do more, as always everybody knows we can just put a sensor in it and make things better. Not really, but I think that's the goal in us trying to determine what's good for farmers. That's what we're here for and trying to help farmers determine what might be the best system for their herd.
What one person has is not going to be what's good for the other. Hopefully, you've learned a little bit today about what sensors we have here at our research center and what we're doing, and where we're going with that. We'll call that a wrap and if you want to know more feel free to contact me about what sensors or where we're going in the future with precision technology and we'll talk to you later.
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