Episode 270 - How Sensors Are Revolutionizing Calf Care- UMN Extension's The Moos Room
Welcome to the moose room. Brad Hines today. Just probably the last time you'll hear me alone, actually, for a little bit. I found Emily. She is not lost.
Brad:She's been busy running all over the state of Minnesota, doing a lot of mental health workshops and extension activities. And she'll join us next week again. We talk to our colleague from Saint Paul campus about manure and sustainability, but we'll dive into some of Emily's things here in December about, some of the mental health things that she's been working on as we move into the holidays and into the new year. But I really wanted to talk today about a subject that's been getting a lot of attention and has been very intriguing for myself, and that's sensors on cabs. I first saw this at World Dairy Expo where a lot of companies were promoting different sensors for lifetime monitoring of dairy calves.
Brad:We'll be diving into some of those sensors to see what they are, what they can do, and I've even tried some of it at our own dairy. So I'll talk a little bit about that as well and kind of what I found and see if it is really worth having these sensors on calves and what it might do for farmers or any industry people. But obviously, calf health is pretty important. So trying to detect sickness or disease in these calves at a much earlier age is very important. Obviously, we know that trying to have healthy calves will in turn have better growth on calves, less problems, get pregnant faster, and have higher milk production when they get into the lactating herd.
Brad:There's been a lot of sensors across the years that people could use for calves, and we've tried some of them here. We've tried pedometers or accelerometers and we did that in some of our projects where we fed calves individually, pairs, groups, and on the cow and they really measured steps. Obviously, we could get a measure of behavior. We know that the calves that were raised on the cow had way more activity and way more steps than a calf that's raised individual. Probably not rocket science.
Brad:Did we need a sensor to do that? Probably not. But it was kind of cool to see how many steps these animals were actually taking during the day. A downside to these pedometers is you have to download the data weekly. You have to use a separate program.
Brad:It maybe doesn't analyze the data as quite as well as others do. It's more meant for research than it would be for a typical farmer to use any of these pedometers on their calves. So let's move into the hot topic that really has been garnering a lot of attention and that's ear tags in calves. You put them in their ear around birth. You can put them over the RFID tag, which is what we use in our account manager system, or they have a separate tag that you can put in there as well.
Brad:And these tags have specific algorithms for calves that detects feeding and lying behavior to be able to give you an alert as to when possibly the calf is not feeling very well. Algorithms are actually farm specific or at least this is what they're promoted as. So every farm is different. Obviously, it's gonna depend on your feeding system, whether your calves are housed individually, whether they're in groups. These systems are promoted to save on labor.
Brad:Sometimes these systems become oh, I should say that you you you've kind of forget about your calves. You put a a tag in their ear and go, oh, well, the system's gonna give me an alert when I know this calf is sick. That might not always be the case. So you still have to go out and watch your calves and see what's happening. This may give an idea about what's going on in their calves, and I'll talk a little bit about some of the things that I've seen in a in a few calves that I've put some sensors in.
Brad:But obviously, the long term economic aspect of this might be an indication. It depends on what the cost of the tag is. Are there subscription fees depending on what system you use? So let's talk a little bit about some of the systems that are being promoted for calf monitoring. By no means am I promoting any of these, so talk about 3 of the top ones that have been promoted on helping of calves.
Brad:I only have one of them. So the 2 of them, I I won't talk much about them, but at least I don't have any data. I have data on 1 and that's CowManager because we have had CowManager at our dairy for over 10 years now. So the first one is PharmFIT by ST Genetics. And this is a internal bolus that you can put in a a calf or a cow.
Brad:So it's one single bolus. It's the same size whether you put it in a calf or a cow. So you don't have to have different sizes of boluses. It also includes a magnet, which is kind of interesting because you might not need to put additional magnets in your animals if you do that. There's a a 3 year warranty on this, internal bolus.
Brad:And really, you can use it to monitor calves and cows. Interesting aspect to this is it monitors the internal body temperature of the calf. So that can be used to help determine whether the calf is not feeling well based on their internal body temperature. I've used internal body temperature boluses in cows before. We have SmaxTech at our dairy as well.
Brad:If you wanna know more about that, feel free to let me know. I we can talk about that on a different episode because we don't put those in in calves, just in cows. But this internal bolus farm fit can be used to, monitor many different things of of that calf. And obviously, there it includes an app where you can track breeding, you can track body weights, you can track growth, you can track any treatments that you give an animal. But it's interesting as we see how these sensors continue in the marketplace.
Brad:And this one I might actually look into in the future. It's a bolus. I'm very intrigued by some of the boluses that we use, and it'll be interesting to see what really happens. But one that I saw at World Dairy Expo is that is intriguing for me as well is called Sensehub by Merck Animal Health. SenseHub is the name, if some of you know, this is version is is callers or SCR, if you've had SCR for a long time and is now called SenseHub.
Brad:And we've had SCR at our dairy for a long time, so this one is very intriguing to me as well. I have not put this in in calves, but may possibly into the future. We'll see. But obviously, this is a separate ear tag that goes into a calf. Obviously, you can put it on the calf around birth.
Brad:Obviously, you can use an app to get alerts, when maybe these calves are not feeling very well. One of the things that's, interesting, you can use this in calves that are in fed individually. You can use it after weaning if you want in group pens, and it will provide different insights for these calves. This one has a blinking LED light on the ear tag. So if you see an alert it will make finding this calf much easier because the blinking light in the ear tag so you will able to find that animal much quicker and be able to have an intervention or treatment.
Brad:So it's really easy identification of the calf that sort of requires your attention into the future. So if you have SCR or SensHub, ear tags or collars for your cows, it will be a separate program. So it won't work with the same program that you have. At least this is what I was told at World Dairy Expo because we have SCR collars. So I would need a a separate program, and the tags wouldn't work with my program.
Brad:So I'd have to look at 2 different programs if I wanted to put this in cabs. Maybe that will change in the future. I I hope that it will change in the future so you can monitor everything, altogether on one program or or one app. And the other one that actually was promoted as well was CowManager. This was promoted at World Dairy Expo as well.
Brad:This one sort of intrigued me because we have CowManager, we've had CowManager for 10 years at our dairy as well, and it really promotes the same thing. A lifetime monitoring of young stock, a lifetime monitoring of young stock to try and find calves that aren't feeling well so it's really about monitoring the health of the calves. CowManager here also has a specific algorithm that is tailored to individual calf alerts. So it really will help monitoring calves as well. And this is an ear tag obviously that you put over the the RFID of of a calf when they're born.
Brad:So I saw these at World Dairy Expo and went, well, that's kind of interesting. I wonder if that would work on our dairy. Because I had I had some blank tags that I still had left over that hadn't been put in any heifers or cows yet. So I'm, like, let's go home and try this. So I did.
Brad:So what are some things that I found? You have to make sure that you put the RFID tag in the right place in the calf ear because these tags obviously have some weight to it, they're supposed to be lighter, but if you don't have the RFID or a button in the correct spot in a calf's ear, it can maybe have a little bit weight on the ear and the ear is gonna sag a little bit. So that's one thing that we noticed right off the bat was a need to have the ear tag in the correct spot in a calf's ear. I think for the most part we did, but there were some maybe 3, 4 out of 30 calves that I've been monitoring that maybe we needed to put the RFID in the right spot. So that's essential.
Brad:That's the first thing. So what else did we do? So I talked to, representatives from CowManager at World Dairy Expo all about calf monitoring and lifetime monitoring, etcetera. So I went and I've been monitoring, our calves. I've got about 30 of them.
Brad:So they're being in a automatic feeder. So I have a home in Lao automatic calf feeder. We've been feeding calves for almost two and a half months now. Some are close to weaning. So we've been monitoring some of these calves for a couple months.
Brad:So I wanted to be able to see if I could correlate rumination time or eating time, activity of these animals with maybe drinking speed or does the system pick up a sick calf as well as the auto feeder picking up a sick calf or how does that really work? So it's all about finding calves that aren't feeling well. That that's the goal. I think I also have ulterior motives to try and figure out when the calf actually starts ruminating because these calves are probably picking up rumination that day 4 or 5 of age just by drinking. Is it really rumination?
Brad:Probably not but it shows up as rumination. So when does rumination really take off in these animals? And then I'm interested in post weaning. So after we wean, what happens to these animals? Does rumination go up a lot?
Brad:Does eating go up? And what their activity is? So it is quite interesting to try and figure out what what's actually hap let's look at a a couple calves. So I'll look at the first calf that I put this sensor on, was born in September, mid September. So it's two and a half months of age now, getting close to weaning.
Brad:I think it's gonna wean next week. So I've been monitoring the calf and well, what what do I find? Well, it really didn't take off in rumination until about 6 weeks of age. So it was it was picking up rumination at quite low levels during the day. You know, is that auto feeder behavior?
Brad:Is that drinking? You know, these calves are are fed 10 liters. They can come and drink when they want on the auto feeder. So really, what is it picking up? Rumination?
Brad:Probably not. Eating behavior? I'm not sure. But maybe it might pick up some activity levels of these animals. It shows that this calf had low activity in when it was young, which is obviously we would think and as the calf get gets older, it would have a lot more activity.
Brad:But this calf has really taken off in rumination at about 6 weeks of age. Obviously, it's probably eating a lot more grain. And even if I look today, it's spending about 20% of its daily activity in eating. Eating what? I'm not sure.
Brad:Could it be grain? Probably mostly grain. Probably. You know, these calves are probably eating £5 of grain. It's also ruminating about 20% of the time.
Brad:So I would guess that it's it's ruminating. Now it's ruminating because we're feeding grain, probably not ruminating at 5 days of age. And the activity level is decreasing or actually the the the not activity level is decreasing so these calves are becoming way more active as they get older. So it's kind of interesting to see that's kind of an example calf, healthy calf. So what about sick calves?
Brad:Well, we have one of those. It's been kind of a, I should say, a problem calf. We're really not sure what's going on. She's got some scours right now, and she's 2 months of age. And this calf is is scouring at 2 months of age.
Brad:So we're we're taking care of her. She's being treated. And but I wanted to look at what's happening in this calf based on the sensor system. Well, if I look at it, she's kind of been a disaster on the sensor system for a long time. She's got very high not active percentages, so she doesn't have much activity.
Brad:She's kinda just laying around. In the early part maybe 6 weeks ago, she had some rumination maybe about 4 to 5%. She was eating about 10% of the time, but other times she was very highly active probably running around with other calves but really not showing much like the other calf that was ruminating a lot. This calf is still not ruminating much at all, not eating much, but she's not feeling well. So when did that sort of pick up?
Brad:Well, if I go back to look at the auto feeder, I can see at about 40 days of age, this calf started going down quite considerably in milk consumption. And she's actually lost I shouldn't say lost some weight, but she's been losing some weight. We have scales on her auto feeder. And so it looks like she's been going down in in some body weight. Her drinking speed is really decreasing.
Brad:She's really not been feeling well. Does the auto feeder correspond to the sensor system? Oh, a little bit. It picks it up at about in the auto feeder, it shows about November 8th or November 9th is when she started to decrease a lot. In the sensor system, maybe about November 2nd is when we see some big dips.
Brad:So they're pretty close to the same amount of time. Was the sensor system picking something up before the auto feeder? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not really sure what's happening, but this is kind of an example of what I see in some of our calves and what's what's happening. For the most part, our calves are doing well.
Brad:We're not getting many alerts on our calves. They're all doing quite well. Even if I look at some of the young calves that we have put on, we've got a couple calves that are just 2 weeks of age on the feeder. Says they're ruminating about 5% of their time. They're eating about 14, 15% of of the day.
Brad:And really, what what is that eating? Is it drinking behavior? Quite possibly. So I was intrigued to see what would happen. So I tried to do some statistics or try and figure out what we were maybe picking up, What was actually rumination, eating behavior, was it actually picking up auto feeder behavior or what was really happening?
Brad:Well so I I have all of the data I have calf data the eating, the ruminating activity levels, and I have auto feeder behavior. I have how much they've drank per day. I have their body weights. So we can kind of really see what's happening. Well, if I look at rumination, the correlation is about 32.32, so pretty low as far as daily consumption of their milk.
Brad:Rumination, so is highly, I would say, well, moderately correlated with drinking speed, so 0.50. So is there some correlation between those 2? Is rumination very similar to drinking speed? Quite possibly. What about eating behavior?
Brad:Well, eating behavior pretty low correlations with daily milk consumption about 0.36 with drinking speed 0.39. So I could say that eating behavior maybe there's something there with drinking speed or trying to pick it up but probably not much not not as much as rumination. Activity levels, the active in CowManager really doesn't have any big correlation 0.15 with drinking speed, 0.26 with amount of milk that they consumed so really a pretty low correlation. High activity, so animals that are very active are showing correlations of about 0.32 to 0.38. So is there something there?
Brad:The animals that are more highly active have higher drinking speeds possibly because calves that are more active probably feel better. They're drinking much faster on the auto feeder. What about calves that are not active? Well, the correlation with no activity and drinking speed is quite negative, minus 0.5. So that really shows that the calves that are have low activity or are not very active have lower drinking speeds which means there's probably picking up some sickness in those animals.
Brad:So animals that are not active have less milk consumption during the day as well. So possibly looking at activity levels or not active levels and this is gonna pick up some sick animals. So it's kind of interesting to see now this is based off of obviously our one herd where I have about 30 calves. Obviously, all the calves are not weaned yet, so it'll be interesting to see what happens. We start weaning this week actually, so I can see what's happening from a weaning standpoint in these calves.
Brad:Well, what about economics? You know, the CowManager tags, obviously, they're a $160. So is there a benefit of putting these tags in in a calf ear to figure out health? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not quite sure yet.
Brad:I don't know if I have a definitive answer on whether that's gonna make any difference. I'll have calves on an auto feeder. I think the auto feeder is picking stuff up as well. But it'll be intriguing to see how these go into the future. Will farmers put tags in their calves' ears?
Brad:I was in Holland in 2016, so almost 8 years ago, and they were putting tags in calf ears way back then and it hadn't gotten to the United States yet. So are we gonna find more people putting ear tags in calves to see what's happening and see if they can monitor calves as a measure of health? And I think I will. I'll probably put some more calves I'll probably put some more tags in calves ears to see what's happening. But we'll see.
Brad:So hopefully, you this has provided some insight into calves and ear tags and sensors. You know, I like ear tags and technology and sensors. So I think this is only gonna grow into the future. So it'll be interesting to see what happens as we move into the future with calf monitoring and actually see if more people and more farmers are are doing this. So let me know if you're doing it.
Brad:I'd really love to talk with you. Maybe, analyze some of your data, see what's happening on your farms. This is very intriguing to me and we're only gonna continue to do more of it at our dairy. So with that, I hope you learned something today about calf monitoring and sensors that are going in calves' ears and what the future might hold for that. If you have any comments, questions, or scathing rebuttals, feel free to email me at the moosroom.
Brad:That's them0osroom@umn.edu. Or be sure to, leave us a voice mail or catch us on the web at University of Minnesota Extension or myself at umnwcrodairy on Instagram. And with that, thanks for listening.
