SenseHub® Dairy cow collars transform herd management

Adding SenseHub Dairy cow collars transformed herd management for Waikato sharemilker Mark Benns, with benefits including:

Mark and Louise are 50-50 sharemilking on her parent’s 65ha (effective) property just outside Morrinsville. Milking 230 Jersey and Jersey-cross cows, they also have 60 heifer calves reared and grazed on-farm. They are in their seventh season on the property and supply local dairy company, Tatua. In March 2022 they got SenseHub Dairy cow collars.

“I don’t know how I could farm without cow collars now, especially being a one-man unit,” Mark says. Within two months of installing them, Mark knew it was a great decision when six cows showed up with alerts to say they were empty.

“We got our vet in to check them, and five out of the six had lost their calves. That’s huge for me to know the data from their collars picked up something was wrong before we could see it, and we could get in early to investigate it.”

“It was a massive win for us to be able to deal with those empties straight away, rather than not realising they’d lost their calves until much later,” Mark says.

When he started investigating cow collars, his primary motivation was saving time identifying cows on heat during the entire mating period. Mark also wanted to maintain consistent reproduction results when a labour unit is employed in the future.

After installing SenseHub Dairy cow collars, Mark found that heat detection accuracy was maintained compared to traditional methods. The real benefit came from removing the stress and pressure that builds up during the mating period.

“The conversations I used to have with myself about cows on heat were pretty intense. I’d be constantly thinking ‘is this cow actually on heat, what’s her tail paint like, who is she next to on the row, is she in the right row and the right place in the row’, stuff like that.”

Mark’s mating plan used to involve a full five-week pre-mating programme, maintaining tail paint twice a week, followed by six weeks of artificial insemination with LIC nominated semen. Then three more weeks of mating using Jersey bulls.

“By the end of the five-week pre-mating and six weeks of nominated AB, I was always really exhausted. But now, with the SenseHub technology creating a list of cows on heat each day, all the pressure has come off,” he says.

Last season, he decided to go to a full artificial breeding system for the first time because of the consistent heat detection accuracy from the collars.

“That period leading into mating and the first six weeks of AB was a heap easier last spring. I’d never go back to life without the collars on my cows,” he says.

The tags of cows selected by SenseHub as being ready for mating are still manually entered by Mark for drafting off through his Protrack® drafting gate.

“With the drafting accuracy of our Protrack system running at damn-near 100%, I still prefer to just punch each tag number in manually so I know it will be drafted off.”

“That’s just me being a control freak, but when Protrack is drafting cows like it is, I’m not prepared to sacrifice that level of accuracy for the slight convenience of auto-drafting.”

Mark says it is not hard to justify the investment in the cow collars when you put a realistic value on your own time.