CALVING
Recovering lost hours A Waikato farmer is finding himself with extra hours in the day during the busy calving period, thanks to solar-powered GPS collars fitted to his herd.
Te Uku farmer Jay Crowhurst installed the Halter smart cow collars on their herd to make their farm a one-man operation.
By Richard Rennie
A
sk any dairy farmer about springtime calving and they will inevitably mention their day needs another couple of hours in it to get all the jobs done and deal with the usual seasonal hiccups that come along. Te Uku farmer Jay Crowhurst knows this well, but this year believes he may be able to recover those lost few hours in every day over calving, and is looking forward to finding out how he can best use them. Last October, Jay and his wife Rowena installed Halter smart cow collars on their 200-head herd, with the aim to try and achieve the challenging task of making the farm essentially a one-man operation, while also giving him more time to spend with his young family. The solar-powered, GPS-enabled collars developed in the Waikato enable a herd to be managed via a smartphone. Herd movements can be scheduled and paddocks defined virtually for cows directed to designated fence-free grazing areas. It seemed appropriate that October 15 last year marked not only the day Jay installed the collars on the herd, but also the birth of their third child.
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Family life was about to get a lot busier with three children under six. “Our hope was that Halter would make life easier and give us more time and that has certainly proven to be the case so far. Spring will hopefully also become a far easier affair,” he says.
“Our hope was that Halter would make life easier and give us more time, and that has certainly proven to be the case so far.” Training the herd to respond to the collars’ audio cues proved easier than anticipated, as it builds on animals’ learnt response to repeated sounds, whether from a collar or from a fence reel being wound up for a new break. “After four weeks I found myself holding a month-old baby and was not stressing about when the cows were being shifted and how the farm was going – even not having to sit behind them every day to get them to the dairy was a big change,” he says.
Jay is now very familiar with the benefits Halter has delivered through the later part of lactation. That includes scheduling his last mob of milkers in autumn to get themselves to the dairy in the morning, ready to go when he arrives. Heading into springtime, Jay is starting to see what a vital role the Halter technology can play in ensuring the herd are fed optimally through winter, while also giving him time to tend to the many other jobs requiring time over winter. “When it comes to managing my winter rotation, I am finding I can really dial in the allocation amounts very efficiently for each mob, with the area reflecting the dry matter I want fed per cow and the residual I want left postgrazing,” he says. The phone-based Halter app also gives him a daily update on round speed and alerts him if he is getting around the farm too fast or has some spare days up his sleeve. Allocating mobs into virtual paddocks is an uncanny exercise at first, but one helping him ensure he is targeting each mobs’ specific feed needs. “I am able to enter in maintenance feed levels for the better conditioned
DAIRY FARMER
July 2021