The Moos Room™

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Interviewer: Welcome back to The Moos Rom everybody. We are back with Glenda Pereira. She is talking about monitoring equipment on a dairy today. A lot of her research with Dr. Bradley J. Heins up at the University of Minnesota Dairy at the West Central Research and Outreach Center is about monitoring equipment, specifically activity monitoring equipment, so callers, leg bands, ear tags, all of it. That's her expertise and we're excited to get into it with her today. We've had some issues recording because we're trying to use Zoom.
We're not allowed to meet in person as we all try to follow CDC guidelines and stay safe. Audio is going to be pretty abrupt as we jump in here. We're missing the audio that had the questions leading into the segment that you'll hear in just a second. The question I'm asking Glenda as we start here is, why did she have interest in Minnesota, why did she choose to move to this incredibly cold place instead of the Hawaii of Europe with the A source.
Glenda Pereira: Right. Being that I had experience with pasture-based systems, because that's the majority of the systems in the A source, I really liked the fact that we were research herd that had ability to be pasture-based. Not many research dairy herds are like that, or even just general dairy farms are pasture-based. There was a really unique component to the West Central Research and Outreach Center.
I also fell in love with the various breeds that they had. There being a hosting girl, coming to experience work with all of these breeds, really put the cherry on top for me. Then I went and finished my last year of undergrad and Brad had funding for masters working with precision dairy technology and pasture-based systems. I came to be his grad student starting in 2016.
Interviewer: Then you started working on monitoring equipment?
Glenda Pereira: We started out with wearables and we just started working with automatic systems or in parlor robotics, that type of precision technology. The wearables we had were still in the phase of validation and different systems, but obviously being that confinement is most common across dairy farming, that's where the systems were first validated. We found that maybe these systems work well in a confinement herd but there's a lot of things that change from a confinement herd to a pasture-based or low-input dairy herd.
Interviewer: I've been to Morris and I've seen the pastures and how many sensors you guys have up there and it's mind-boggling how many different posts are out on the fence lines trying to pick up all the sensors. It's already difficult enough in confinement to get all that stuff hooked up and figured out and where it goes. I would assume that most of these technologies are based on an algorithm. They can look at different actions and data and decide how much data activity level and things like that. How different is that when you go to a pasture?
Glenda Pereira: Yes, that's the challenge and that's something that we tried to do research on because there was a knowledge gap and we wanted to fill that. Of course, I also want to mention that pasture-based systems and even organic systems within the United States can benefit a lot from precision technologies. For example, in organic systems for estrus detection, you can't sink the cows, you can't use any of those systems or timed AI. Detecting estrus is really important and this is where precision dairy technologies can fit. They fit well in pasture-based and organic systems.
Interviewer: Somehow I always forget, and I'm reminded every time that I used to work on a lot of organic dairies, but I feel like sinking cows and things like prostaglandin and GnRH, they're so ingrained in the dairy system. I forget that organic producers can't use them. That makes a lot of sense. The activity monitors are the perfect fit.
Glenda Pereira: Right. Even for preventing, a big thing that you have to do in an organic system, because you can't treat cows with everything that you can. In a conventional or commercial dairy system, is you have to get at the problem before there's a visual sign and wearables or these monitoring systems can really help with that. If they're recording eating time, rumination time, everything like that or even in the parlor, if they're recording those milking parameters. If the cow is off of what her usual activity is, those systems can tell you and then before you even visually see that so it's really advantageous in organic herds to use a tool like this.
Interviewer: That makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 3: It's actually growing. There's quite a few that, at least in Minnesota here that do have activity systems. Some have collar systems, some have ear tag systems, some of the organic dairies, with robotics. some organic dairies have robots so you have an activity system that comes right with the robots. There's quite a few grazing and organic dairies that have robots now in Minnesota and the Upper Midwest here. They all have activity systems.
Interviewer: That's cool.
Speaker 3: It's growing.
Interviewer: Do you have a preference, Glenda? I know we've got callers, we've got anklets, we've got ear tags. I'm asking you to tell me which one's the best.
Glenda Pereira: There isn't a best because the way that it works is always evolving. The first Apple watch, it wasn't what the Apple Watch 5 is now. These monitoring systems are always evolving and changing based on what they see that is working and not working. Whenever people ask me that, I always say, "Well, how are you going to use this system and what do you want to get out of it?"
Because if a dairy manager's looking for estrus detection, then, here's a system that works really well for estrus detection and it's super easy and let's get on with it, but if you're looking to spend some more time and you want to do more with it, then here's what I suggest. I personally really enjoy the ear tags myself just because of how much management I have had to do with these. Personally, for me, ear tags are super easy to put on and take off. However, as I had mentioned a lot of things factor into which one is the best.
Interviewer: One of the coolest things with the ear tag system, and I don't think people understand how it works, and I honestly, I don't understand completely how it works, is how can I get ruminations from having that ear tag? From what I can tell, it's the ear movement. They've identified specific ear movement that is associated with rumination.
Glenda Pereira: Yes. Someone like me that I did for many, many, many hours, I sat there and watched the cow. You can do it two ways. You can watch videos. If you're in a confinement, heard it is easy to set up a camera. However, in a pasture-based herd, it is not. Someone like me sat there and said, "This cow was ruminating from time A to time B." Then someone will go back in to look at the raw data from the system and say, "This is ruminating."
That's the problem with validating these four confinement herds versus pasture-based herds because there's a lot of factors that can affect ruminating in pasture. As you mentioned, grazing is eating and activity. How do you say one is eating and one is activity? They are two different things. We were challenging that and saying, "Grazing is not just eating, it's also activity." We actually got to validate a grazing behavior for one of the companies that we worked with because it's very specific. It's a very specific behavior.
Interviewer: It's always been fascinating to me. I figured it had to be something like that, that someone just spent way too much time sitting there watching a cow and then someone else had to correlate with what they saw. That's amazing to me that someone figured that out and it blows my mind every time that I think about it. I like your tags when I see them on the system and when I see them on farm, I like how they're managed and the way that they're set up now in a lot of the different companies out there, they're not all that big. I don't worry about them falling out all the time, which is always the biggest concern because they're expensive.
Glenda: You would be surprised. [laughs]
Interviewer: Oh, yes. Ear tags are going to fall out no matter what, especially in confinement with headlocks and everything else. They're very good at getting them ripped out at some point.
Bradley: I'll tell you, I'm surprised how many heifers we have lost, had ear tags lose out of their ears on pasture. We probably lose 10 ear tags a year from our heifers on pasture. These are breeding-age heifers. I'm not sure if they've fallen out or what's going on.
Interviewer: Who knows? Heifers--
Bradley: It's life. We've tried to find them and they're hard to find.
Interviewer: What if the system has a GPS function? Can you find those tags that fall out?
Glenda: GPS can give you--
Bradley: GPS is grad students. What do you mean?
Interviewer: Yes, just walking the pasture and--
Bradley: Exactly.
Glenda: The GPS can give you some indication of where it is, but it's not perfect. A pasture-based system, you also factor in the fact that it can get pushed underground.
Interviewer: Okay. It just makes me laugh because I know that people are losing tags. I think I had heard from one of the reps that they were like, "Well, you can find the tags." I'm like, "Can you though?"
Bradley: You can. A couple of the systems you can. Obviously it costs a little bit more to have that feature so is it worth paying the extra money for that feature or just to buy another tag? I guess.
Interviewer: Glenda, you're saying when you're choosing a system, the biggest factor is knowing what you want it to do, because there's no reason to pay extra money if you're never going to use that feature, right?
Glenda: Correct, yes. It's really based on the person using the system. I and Brad love to look at data. What were these cows doing on this day, on that day? We would want something that spits out a lot of data but is that practical for a day-to-day person who is doing a lot of herd checks or things like that? No. You want something that can be easy to use.
Interviewer: How much control do you have over it? Let's say it keeps picking up and telling you that these cows have an issue because ruminations are decreased and you consistently can't find anything wrong with them. Can you adjust it? Can you change the threshold levels? Is that all a possibility in these systems? Bradley?
Bradley: This is funny to me.
Glenda: I want red talk because in the beginning with our first system, we had to do some adjustment.
Bradley: You can adjust. The company can adjust some algorithms. Usually, they have an algorithm that does all their computations. You can't necessarily change that as a farmer. When we first started we were breaking one of the systems that we had just because it had a lot higher activity than what they would have expected just because it was a pasture-based herd. They had to readjust the thresholds and stuff so we weren't having such high activity levels in our herd. It can happen, but it doesn't, not that often. There are some, we just have a new one now that maybe we'll see if it works a little bit better for pasture-based herds or not. They have some sort of grazing algorithm. Glenda just had a paper published that looked at one that tried to look at grazing behavior that does it quite well. How many techno-- We've got like what, five or six of them?
Glenda: Yes.
Interviewer: I've seen your cows, they have quite a lot of jewelry.
Glenda: Jewelry, yes.
Bradley: I think most of the cows, well, I'll tell you what we have on the cows. I'm pretty free and people want to ask us about them, they can. We have SCR heat time on cows, we have cow manager on all of the cows, we have AFIAC on all of the cows. Those are the main ones. We have SmartBow as well, mostly on the grazing herd, the organic herd, just because that's a solar system used for pasture-based. We also have used RumiWatch, that's a probably a scientific one, that's not one for a farmer.
Glenda: It's like a halter and it gives you really good data because it is meant for scientific experiments.
Bradley: Lots of eating and drinking behaviors and stuff. We also have-
Glenda: Smacstech.
Bradley: -Smacstech bolus, so we can look at internal temperature, body temperature of cows that we use for heat stress stuff. I think that's all.
Interviewer: That's a lot of data.
Bradley: I think that's all. That's what we have for now.
Glenda: That is a lot of data.
Interviewer: Yes, that�s a lot of--
Bradley: Yes, it's a lot of data, especially our milking system is AFI milk. It�s just how do you-- That's the big question, is how does a farmer use all of this data is the big question that I think still eludes all of us.
Interviewer: Yes, that's where we're headed is that we need a way to manage all this data. That's not a problem. That's unique to the dairy industry, obviously. Big data is a big business right now.
Bradley: We should say we talk about beef. Some of these systems have actually-- Glenda, she did all the lit review stuff, but some of these systems, they started in beef cattle as well, or have validated them in beef animals as well.
Interviewer: It's quite an investment up front between tags and sensors and everything else. I think it would be very difficult to run that break even on a beef operation, but if you've got high-dollar seed stock animals, it could definitely do some stuff for you. I think there's a labor-saving component of watching for heats and things like that. It definitely plays into that.
Bradley: I named a few of the technologies that we have, but there's so many more out there. There's pedometers, there's devices that notify people about calving in animals, you name it. There's so many out there and the sky is the limit, but I think it goes back to what Glenda said, you have to determine what you're going to use it for and then pick the technology because sometimes they can be expensive. Like that upfront investment is not cheap.
Interviewer: No. The difficulty with some of this is trying to figure out how to put prices and then costs and value savings on some of the things that you're-- because a lot of it's time, which is not hard to value and in some cases for a lot of farmers is fairly priceless. Then there's the things like, well, I actually can catch this animal a day or two earlier than I would have otherwise for an illness. It's like, "How do I put a cost on that and how do I value that so that I can figure out that break even or where does it lie?" You can go back to pregnancy rate and decide, �Well I'm actually going to get semen in this many more cows, so even if my conception rate doesn't change, my heat detection rate is off the chart now.�
Bradley: I'd say our herd has improved. Before we put in the first system in 2013, and we were running a 28, 29 preg rate. We're running 42 preg rates right now. Granted that's a lower production herd grazing-based so it's probably higher than the average conventional herd. We've improved our preg rate immensely just by using the activity system for breeding. It works out and we probably still have way more heifers than we should because we find all those animals in heat. It helps. We don't solely rely on it for heat detection, but it's a great tool that helps us improve our heat detection skills.
Glenda: My last point to make was everything else you guys have talked about on this podcast that I've really liked, is that these are tools. We can't replace a person or anything else management-wise and put in an ear tag or a collar or whatever and say, "Okay, I no longer have to manage this because now I have this." Really, this is a tool to help us manage better. You still have to do everything correctly for AIing. Okay, great, the cow's in heat, but what about your AI prep or your semen prep and everything like that? The area that they're in, the nutrition and everything like that.
Interviewer: Yes that's pretty consistent with most of these technologies that we see. Even if you look at robots, robotic milking, people look at it and say, "Well, I'm saving labor." Well, I don't know if you're saving labor, you're just changing what kind of labor that you're going to do. In some cases, I think these save time, but again, like Glenda said, you got to continue to do everything else right or it doesn't really matter at all. Well, I think we've got plenty of tape. If we have more to talk about too, we can just have you back again, Glenda, if there's more stuff you want to talk about.
Bradley: She can talk about crossbreeding and feed efficiency one day.
Interviewer: That'd be good, we can do that later. That�d be good. All right, that's all we got for today. Thank you for listening to the Moos Room. If you want to get ahold of us, questions, comments, scathing, rebuttals, catch us at themoosroom@umn.edu. That�s T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu. Again, thanks for listening. We'll catch you next episode.
Bradley: Does anybody email you with that?
Glenda: I'm just waiting for the day, like you let one of us spell the email address.
Interviewer: Yes, you can go for it any time. I'll start and I'll say, you can catch us at the moos room@umn.edu and then one of you can just go T-H -E-M-O-O-S
Glenda: Like a cheer. [chuckles]
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