SUMMER 2023
Our Passion. YOUR SUCCESS ®
MINNESOTA
SELECT SIRES CO-OP, INC.
SELECTIONS
ROUND-THE-CLOCK MONITORING FOR YOUR HERD Busy schedules, labor challenges and personnel constraints have most dairies looking for shortcuts to get the work done on the farm. Sometimes, however, shortcuts come with short results because the task wasn’t completed effectively or efficiently. CowManager® offers dairy producers an additional set of resources to help achieve the herd’s reproductive and health related goals. This ear tag sensor provides producers the latest in technology to monitor animal fertility, rumination, activity and temperature. Making the system one of the most resourceful “employees” on the farm. Herd size or facility design doesn’t matter when it comes to CowManager. A pasture-based herd of 25 cows or a freestall setup with 20,000 cows can both take advantage of the technology. The information is always available and always updating. The software used is able to interface with nearly all dairy management software. This prevents redundancies in data entry and allows existing systems and sort gates to communicate with CowManager. Automated sort gates assist in bringing only the cows that need attention. This practice will decrease cow handling, consequently increasing labor efficiency and cow productivity.
All team members can have access to the information and alerts. You can share with your veterinarian, nutritionist, reproductive specialist and herd manager. Involving each member of the dairy’s support team helps ensure the best use of the information. Together, your management team can integrate these records with the parlor data, dairy management software and sort gates to efficiently identify, treat or breed individuals based on your herd’s parameters. The reproductive specialist can go to the sorted cows and not spend time searching in the freestalls and interrupting the non-estrus cows. The nutritionist can look at herd data and notice that the herd has dropped in total rumination time. The herd manager can better focus his efforts on the cows that need attention, versus walking pens trying to get eyes on every cow. The multifunctionality of CowManager technology helps everyone on the dairy make better use of the real-time information, time and labor. Pat Ihrke, Hidden Hill Dairy of St. Charles, Minnesota, says, “We saw an immediate increase in conception rates after the installation of CowManager. The 24/7 access to current data is one of the premier advantages of the system. Almost everyone on our dairy’s management team uses the mobile app to reference the graphs and data, including our veterinarian, breeding technician and nutritionist. The various functions of the CowManager system allow us to pinpoint the cows that need attention and saves us time in the long-run.” Continue reading on page B.
IN THIS ISSUE A u Round-The-Clock Monitoring
C u Outstanding Summer Interns
B u Round-The-Clock Monitoring, continued
D u From the General Manager