The Moos Room™

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[cow moos]
Joe Armstrong: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. We were trying to get a guest, we did not get a guest. They'll be here at some other time. It's just the OG3 yet again.
Emily Krekelberg: Again. I feel like we do this in cycles. They get a lot of OG3, and then they get a lot of awesome guests, and then they're stuck with us again.
Joe: I'll take the blame 100%. I am still on paternity leave. I'm at home with the child, and he takes a lot of time, a lot of time.
Emily: Oh, yes, let's get a brief baby update there, Joe. I'm sure the listeners are dying to know how things are going.
Joe: Dying to know. At the day we're recording here, he's 11 weeks old, Locklin Armstrong. Doing good most of the time.
Bradley Heins: Sleeping through the night?
Joe: Not sleeping through the night completely. He's been consistently waking up once.
Bradley: That's good.
Joe: It's not too bad at all.
Bradley: Getting better.
Joe: Yes, getting better. One day I'll have sleep again like a normal person, maybe, and right about then we'll probably have another kid.
Emily: Have another one. I can confirm Locklin is very cute.
Joe: He's adorable. It's a good thing.
Emily: He must get all that from his mom.
Joe: Yes, it's definitely not me. Definitely not me. Like I said, we run a podcast on purpose. Face for podcasting, right?
Emily: [laughs] Yes, that's all of us for sure.
Joe: All right. Well, today we are talking about something we mentioned in the last episode. We wanted to get to some repro, and we're going to start with the traditional method of heat detection. That's our repro program, heat detection, who's in heat, breeding whoever's in heat. I think we can talk about this both on the beef and on the dairy side a little bit, but we'll start with the dairy. We've been using this forever, it's nothing new. Of course, Bradley's saying, we'll come in here eventually. We're going to put a sensor in it.
Bradley: Of course. Of course.
Joe: We're going to get to that because Bradley has all the toys up there that he can talk about. This is nothing new. Obviously, people know about it. Whether you using chalk or paints or Kamars, whatever you're using to identify animals on heat, or you're just visually watching. Which a lot of people are doing that as well, especially on the dairy side when you're talking about heifers.
Emily: I will say one word of caution, though, on just, observational heat detection. I've been to so many dairies where they go, "Oh, yes, we all take turns. We all watch for heat. We're all in charge of that." If anybody says, "We're all doing it," you know what that means?
Bradley: Nobody is.
Emily: No one's doing it.
Joe: No. 100%.
Emily: I'm always a proponent at the very least, do tail chalk or, do something, because just depending on hoping that you catch a mounting event when you're walking through, that's not going to be effective enough. In my opinion, and I am no repro-expert by any means.
Joe: No, I think you're right, Emily. There's a lot of times when someone says, "We're all doing that," it's not happening. I see that with lameness as well. "Oh, we all watch for lamenesses." No, I think it's important to either set aside time or have a set protocol for lameness, is the same thing for repro. If you're going to be watching heat, there has to be scheduled time to do it. What the studies are saying, if you spend between 10 and 15 minutes, three times a day, you can pick up 95% of the animals on heat. That's just watching, no chalking, no nothing. That's pretty good, I think. That's a lot of time, and it adds up. That's 45 minutes of your day you're looking for heat. That's why we get into chalking and doing other things.
Emily: If you have one person that can be the designated observer, then by all means go for it, but don't tell me, "It's everyone's job." It's no one's job.
Joe: Exactly. Kamar is walking and chalking. I think that those are big things. Personally, I love-- there's something nice to me about walking and chalking, especially when you get into massive amounts of animals. I'm biased, though, because I like seeing the animals locked up because I get a chance to look at them and see other things besides just walking and chalking. I can look at teeth, I can look at feet, I can do all these other things and notice who's sick, and it becomes part of your fresh check and all your other things that you're doing.
I like walking and chalking. I've never been a big fan of Kamars. Some people love them, or anything that sticks to the back like that. I don't know what you're using up besides activity monitors or using anything else, Bradley.
Bradley: We do extra tech patches. That's a brand that we use, and they're used here for a long time. The other, just like Kamar or something like that, you put them on the back of the cow and they detect heat. They turn different colors when somebody else jumps on them. They're not perfect, but it's just another tool to use for that. I might recommend those maybe for smaller herds too.
We talk about chalking and all of that, what if you have a tie-stall barn or something like that where you're milking 100 cows? Maybe you should use some patches or other methods to detect that kind of heat if you're not a big enough size or don't have a free-stall barn or something like that. Patches may work for those type of herds.
Joe: I think there's definitely situations where all of these things can work. For heat detection, I guess we should go back to the absolute basics just to make sure how to tell if a cow's on heat, and which cow's on heat when there's two cows that are screwing around and one is mounting the other cow, who's actually in heat. It's usually a funny thing to bring up, I know. I know you guys are giving me stupid looks right now, but the amount of times I've been on a farm and that has come up where the person doesn't know which cow's on heat, or they're thinking that it's the cow that's mounting, that's jumping the other cow, that the cow that's jumping is in heat. That's not the case. It's the cow that's standing there.
Emily: Tends to be wrong.
Bradley: No, it could be, sometimes it's both of them.
Joe: Could be, could be. That's where it gets tricky. You got to be watching.
Emily: But you know for sure the one who's standing to be mounted.
Joe: Yes. I know that sounds super basic. I'm sorry, we just have to throw that out there just to make sure everyone knows that.
Emily: I think it's important you bring it up because I think there are a lot of people who don't know that or who always assume that it's just both cows.
Joe: Absolutely.
Emily: I don't think there's anything wrong with bringing that up. It's one of those things that we aren't willing to admit we don't know, so we just fumble through life trying to figure it out.
Joe: I think the majority of people know that. That's pretty common knowledge for the most part. Just in case someone's out there, maybe we just changed someone's life, just completely changed it.
Emily: Maybe. Besides mounting, what are some other signs from the cow?
Joe: The big one is increased activity, just in any way. They're moving more, ballering, or whatever you want to call it. They're vocalizing. Some of them get really pushy when you're in the pen. They'll come find you and lick you and push you around a little bit. That's the big thing. Then clear discharge from the back end. Those are all signs of heat. It's one of those things where if someone's been doing it for such a long time, they get so good at telling who's in heat, they don't even really have to think about it and they just know that cows in heat, if you do it long enough, it's just a numbers game.
That's why the activity monitors work when we're talking about pedometers and things like that. That's why they can tell. They just see an absolute increase in activity, and it's a huge spike on the graph. The other methods were depending on someone mounting that animal to show us if there's a heat.
Bradley: What's the reason why we don't watch for heats anymore?
Joe: Because you put a sensor in it?
Bradley: No, because most people think they don't have time to do it.
Joe: True.
Bradley: It's labor. That's the big thing.
Emily: Oh, absolutely.
Bradley: In my mind, I think it's labor, and we've all done it. It's part of the reason why we put a sensor in it out here.
Joe: Exactly.
Emily: All sensors all the time, baby.
Joe: All of them, all the time.
Bradley: Exactly.
Joe: I love heat detection because it's a big piece of a repro program. This might be a surprise to everyone listening, but if an animal never sees semen, they can't get pregnant.
Bradley: What? Come on. I have a pregnant report right here that says, "I have a cow that is pregnant, and she has never been bred."
Joe: No, no.
[laughter]
Emily: That's something immaculate.
Bradley: You tell me. Something is going on.
Joe: If a cow doesn't see semen, she can't get pregnant. That's why I harp on a heat detection quite a bit because it automatically affects your pregnancy rate. If you don't have good heat detection, you will not have a good preg rate. It's just part of the game. Heat detection. There's the manual ways to do it now. We've mentioned it several times now. Brad's putting sensors in it. That's the way that he's chosen to solve it especially [crosstalk].
Emily: I had no idea. You use sensors, Brad?
Bradley: Exactly. Way too many of them.
Emily: Brad's cows wear more jewelry than I do.
Bradley: Exactly.
Joe: It's borderline. I saw your jewelry collection Instagram. It was a huge board of earrings.
Emily: Yes. Actually, I downsized. I probably got rid of about half of my jewelry collection.
Joe: That's what was left after you got rid of the half?
Emily: Yes.
Joe: Holy buckets.
Emily: Anyways.
Joe: Anyway, cows at Brad's place were a bunch of jewelry. We're not here to talk about a specific product. We're here to talk about activity monitors in general. Go ahead, Brad.
Bradley: Away I go.
Joe: Away he goes.
Emily: Yes, buckle up, everyone.
Bradley: Exactly. Well, I should tell you why did we switch to sensors. They were becoming quite popular in the dairy world. We're not the only ones. There's a lot of people. You go to a lot of dairies now, and they have some activity monitoring system. That was really why people put them in was for breeding purposes because they measured activity and increasing activity for cows, probably means that she's in heat. Not always.
We have had a sensor system here since 2013. We've been really breeding our cows with it for seven, almost eight years now. Was it easy to start with? No, not at all. Our employees didn't really want to believe in it early on. We still use patches today. I see activity systems as just another tool. It's like using patches or chalking, or something else. I see them as another tool to aid in heat detection because they're not perfect by any means.
It depends on the herd and how the system acts. We have a pasture-based herd so our cows have a lot more activity so we tend to have a lot more false positives in our herd than some other herds. There's lots of nuances that go along with these systems. When you think about them, there's many different kinds, there's collars, there's ear tags, there's boluses you can put in a cow, you name it. People have figured out how to make an accelerometer out of it and make a heat detection system.
I will tell you the benefit that I have seen in all of our sensor systems that we have had it helps us on the return cows. It's not helping us on the cows that are really in heat. It's the cows that we don't see at 10 o'clock at night that are in heat because nobody's out checking heats at 10 o'clock at night like I suspect on many dairies. We're catching those cows that are heat late at night or early in the morning before we milk. I have really seen a benefit in our heifers.
I think people could see lots of benefits in their heifers because some dairies raise their heifers somewhere else, off-site. Our heifers in the summertime are two miles from the barn. We don't go down there all the time, so we have a sensor system that is solar that can reach those heifers two miles away and beam back the data and we can catch those heifers on heat. That's where we've really seen it. We do much better with our heifer breeding now because we're using that as a tool instead of visual because we're not going to sit down there and watch heifers all day long on heat.
Emily: You don't have that visual, yes.
Bradley: Right. That's what we've really seen.
Joe: I think heifers is my favorite place to use an activity monitor system and mostly because of what you said, Brad, the time and/or where the heifers are makes it almost impossible to catch those heats. The solution unfortunately for a lot of dairies is that's where you see a lot of these bulls on farms is their bull breeding heifers. Bull breeding heifers if you're talking about genetics and advancing genetics on your farm is not the right way to go if that's your goal.
I love this system in heifers. I think it's awesome. There's not the added complication of having to walk to and from the parlor that adds to some of the activities stuff that happens. I think it's perfect for heifers. I've seen a lot of repro programs turned around by putting an activity monitor system in when it comes to heifers.
The biggest thing that I see that I've seen struggled with with the heifer systems is that the database and the program and the collars needs a baseline. You can't just put it on and have it work the next day. That animal needs to be wearing that collar so it gets an idea of what is normal so that it can tell you when something is up or down. That adds a complication to pen size and things like that because you have to account for the animal being in that pen that she's going to get bred in for a time period usually 7 to 14 days wearing that collar before you actually breed her or have the chance to because the collar won't work yet.
That's the biggest thing I see with the heifers that gets messed up is that you end up with an overcrowded pan because you build it thinking one thing and then realize that you have to have more in there. That's in the earlier than you think. But I love these systems for heifers. I think they're excellent.
Bradley: I shouldn't say we use many different ways. I think some of them are built for different circumstances. Some have collars that's really what they started out with. The first ones that came to the US were really collar-based systems. We found out and you talk to other producers, they take a lot of maintenance. A collar system takes maintenance. It takes time. Some farms when they first started out they just bought enough collars for just the breeding group so they were changing collars all the time. Taking them off, put them on.
When we started out, we just put the collar on and we left it off. We actually took it off when the cow went dry, and then put them back on when they got fresh. We thought, "Well that's kind of a pain too." Now a cow gets a collar it just stays on as long as it's working. We just don't take it off. Yes, it costs more because you just have to have a collar for everything. We have some ear tag systems as well and we put those on 14 months, 15 months of age when a heifer is bred and it just stays on her for her whole life. As long as the sensor works, we just keep it on.
Joe: How long do they usually work bred? I know, there's different lifetimes for each system.
Bradley: Different lifetimes. I think if you look some of these systems usually they give you a three-year warranty with a sensor so you can get it replaced within a warranty. They do last longer than that. It just depends on your conditions. At some point, I had some of the early tags when we first started seven years ago, and the cold winter here would just make them die really fast because there was a battery in them and it just didn't last. That was the frustration. We're taking tags off or collars off all the time just because they were dead because of the cold. They're much better now they last longer. I would say they can last five to seven years. Don't hold that against me if yours don't last that long. I'm not saying that [crosstalk]--
Emily: No, you heard it here, folks.
Bradley: Exactly.
Joe: Somebody's against Bradley for sure.
Emily: Bradley guarantees that timeframe, five to seven years.
Bradley: No, I don't. Nothing is guaranteed because I've put some sensors on and the thing dies six months later. It happens.
Emily: Bradley, have you ever used the straps that you would put around their ankles?
Bradley: Oh, yes. Some people have just a pedometer measuring activity. There are a few companies that use that. We have it with our milking system. That's the newest sensor that we've had for not even a year yet because it's with our milking system. That one comes with a unique set of reports that is special for pasture-based herds. Maybe activity can be a little bit different in our pasture-based herds. This one maybe works that out a little bit better for pasture-based herds.
Emily: Yes. I have no idea about sensors with something like ankle pedometers be less expensive because they're only tracking steps versus a collar or a tag or a bolus or whatever newfangled thing they have.
Bradley: Yes. These sensor prices are different for everything. Pedometers would be cheaper on the leg just because they're only measuring activity. Well, these sensors we only think about them for heat detection. We're only talking about them but they can be used for health, feeding, you name it, many different other things.
Emily: Seen a lot of them track rumination.
Bradley: Right. Some the more information you want out of them, the more it's going to cost you. It depends on what your herd goal is. If you want to use them for just fertility and that's what most people want them for is heat detection. You can get them just for heat detection and they work great. If you don't want to use the rumination and all that, I wish we did more with rumination and health status with our tags, but it just takes time too to sift through all that stuff every day. We talked about why don't we visually heat detect, well, we don't have time. We don't have time for somebody to sit at a computer for an hour or more trying to figure out, who's in heat, who's not feeling good and what do we do.
Emily: The one thing grant money can't buy you, more time.
Bradley: That is correct. I wish it could.
Joe: If anything, grant money takes time away now.
Bradley: Yes, exactly.
Joe: At some point. There's a lot of other uses for these activity monitors and I think that's the-- Actually I've seen quite a few people buy them thinking that they will use more than just the activity. I would say it's actually fairly rare that someone uses more than just the activity. I think there's a lot of people, like Brad said, there's not enough time to look at all that data. I think you, especially with the ruminations, you have to play around with the sensitivity of the alerts and things like that because I've seen somewhere, if you checked on every cow that it alerted you to, it'd be just so much extra work, so much extra work.
Emily: Joe, you're leading into a point I want to make about-- and we've talked about this with other things too, in that these sensors are a tool. They're not a replacement for management. They are a tool to enhance your management. We see it with anything, sensors, robots, et cetera, where people get them thinking that means they can neglect that or don't have to worry about that or it will do the job for them, but that's not what it's about. Those things still need to be managed. It just takes a different type of management.
For some management systems, that stuff doesn't work and that's fine, but I think that's always my thing because it's money and we're always talking money. When you're trying to decide what's going to work for you and what's not, it's like, "Don't spend the money if you're not going to use this the way it's supposed to," or if you're not going to use it at all.
Joe: We see that a lot with, I would say, any technology adoption and a lot with robotics, for sure. I think people assume, "Oh, this is going to eliminate work or eliminate labor," that it might change. It changes.
Emily: Yes, it eliminates some labor. It changes labor and it does not eliminate management. Nothing [crosstalk].
Joe: No, it never eliminates management and it sometimes, some of these technology advances just change the kind of work you're doing. You don't always gain back time. You just change the style of stuff that you're going to be doing.
Bradley: I also think that sometimes producers buy these systems hoping that it's going to fix their repro problem or fix some of the other issues when I think-- I'll admit, our preg rate improved when we put in an activity system. It did. We got great benefit, but did I expect that it's just going to magically make a whole bunch of more cows pregnant and we're going to all of a sudden go from a first service conception rate of 40% to 80%? That's no. You got to have realistic goals with these sensor systems. They're not just going to magically have great outcomes.
It takes time. You can't go in and all of a sudden you put a sensor system in and a month later you're just going to have great repro. It doesn't, it takes time and effort to know what you're looking for because there's false positives too or there's false negatives or-- Some of this is you got to look at your cows and look at your management and see what's going on.
Emily: Yes. I feel like you need to spend time establishing what that baseline is, like you were saying, especially Brad, how on a pasture system, the cows are doing more activity anyways because they're walking around the pasture. Just knowing what is normal and spending some time to figure out what that level is. Because for every herd, it's going to be different.
Joe: Oh, yes.
Bradley: It is.
Joe: 100%. Like Brad said, this isn't going to magically fix anything. Most likely your conception rate will not change, I would guess, because all this is really helping you do is catch more cows on heat. Your heat detection rate changes. Your conception might not change. If you can get better heat detection, your preg rate is going to automatically go up as long as if conception stays the same. That's the benefit of these systems. Then again, the labor side of it too, and the time.
I'm a big fan. Like I said, if I had to choose, I would use them in heifers all the time. I love them in heifers and then make your decisions on the cow side based on what you're doing. I'm personally a fan of timed AI, but I recognize that timed AI is not for everyone and can't be for everyone if you're talking organic. Yes, it's a different tool in the toolbox that you should take advantage of if it's something that seems to be like for you, it is an advancement. There's plenty of people, most of the time, people with technology like this and sensors love to show it off, especially if they just got it. Ask around, see who's got one, figure out who you can go see, talk to as many people as you can to figure out which one is the best for you.
Emily: Give Bradley a call.
Bradley: That's right, hey.
Emily: He will give you a whole rundown.
Bradley: That's right, you come up here and see my sensor systems anytime. I'll show you all eight of them.
Joe: Bradley wants to show you his sensors. He wants to.
Emily: Show me your sensors, Bradley.
Bradley: Exactly.
Joe: On that, we're going to wrap it before it gets any worse. We're going to be back to repro for sure, talk about timed AI. We got to get more into the beef side too. We talked mostly dairy today. We'll be back to repro over and over again, probably have an expert on that knows more than us. No one knows more than Bradley about sensors, probably not an expert in sensors. If you have comments, questions, scathing rebuttals for us, send them to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe: Go to the website, extension.umn.edu. Check us out on Facebook @UMNDairy and @UMNBeef. There is a YouTube channel coming soon. We're working on the videos. You'll get to see intro videos for myself, Emily, and Bradley so you get to know more about us. Look for that coming soon, fairly soon.
Emily: In the meantime, you can subscribe to the U of M Extension Farm Safety and Health channel. Just get on YouTube and search for U of M Extension Farm Safety and Health.
Joe: Perfect. Give that subscription to Emily, she needs it.
Emily: My job depends on it.
Joe: One day I'll have sleep again like a normal person maybe and right about then we'll probably have another kid.
Emily: Have another one.
Joe: Yes.
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[cow moos]
[00:27:51] [END OF AUDIO]
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