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FARM SERVICES » Dairymaster Milking Systems
NZ Dairy
Monitor keeps an eye on cows Karen Phelps Hundreds of thousands of dairy farmers throughout the world are now relying on MooMonitor to keep a track of their herd’s health and fertility, says Julian Bentley, Dairymaster key account manager. He says the system has helped farmers to make big savings and improvements in these key areas of their business by getting cows into calf quicker and easier. MooMonitor was first created in the early 2000s and was the first system to use very sensitive motion sensing to track animal behaviour 24/7 with the use of quick release collars fitted to the cows. “Earlier systems, and a lot of current systems, use increased animal activity to define oestrus. This has the downside that there are a lot of false positives when the animal increases activity for any other reason,” explains Julian. “In the MooMonitor collar is a very sensitive motion sensor allied with a 32-bit processor that does over three million measurements per cow per day. This individual cow information is measured against that cow’s normal behaviour over the previous weeks to determine when there is a major change to that animal.” This information is stored, if the cow is not in range, before being sent by radio signal to a base station. “The information is then sent to the internet where it is processed and available on any device connected the internet. This means that the farmer’s vet, nutritionist, AI provider etc can also have log ons to see what needs doing on the farm. The farmer can control many things from a MooMonitor smart phone app such as taking the collar off, putting the animal on a watch list, adding a heat or insemination (including which bull), setting drafting, putting in a calving, pregnancy check, body condition score, putting in a health event or a ‘do not breed’ time on the animals, adding a dry off event or deleting the animal from the farm. The app also lets farmers load bulls so when the farmer puts in an insemination they can say what bull was used. Because so many farmers around the world use the system this has brought cumulative advantages as the technology can be improved more rapidly by collecting large amounts of date, says Julian. MooMonitor+ is the latest version and
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enhancements include tracking and measuring the cow’s rumination, feeding, resting and activity. In fact MooMonitor+ has 24 times the data of the original MooMonitor. “As the system is internet based we are continually developing it and all developments are applied to the systems in the field so our customers get continual upgrades,” says Julian. MooMonitor was released in New Zealand about two years ago and is supplied by Dairymaster. Julian says the product has had benefits for all farmers - even those that were not having problems getting cows in calf save significant amounts of time, freeing up staff to focus on other tasks on farm. “A good tool is a tool that gets used,” says Julian. “As the information comes straight to the smart phone, and information gets put in the smart phone we find people do use MooMonitor+ regularly as it is so easy. I find as a reproduction consultant the failings in breeding are often in time and record keeping. MooMonitor+ customers save a lot of time and have records in the cloud. The big improvement I see is that pre joining all cows can be assessed on the desktop to see if they are cycling normally or not. “Cows that are cycling normally are likely to be inseminated early in the joining season for a good calving pattern but, importantly, cows that are not cycling pre joining can be health checked to see why they are not cycling, and treated so that they will also get joined early in the joining period. “These cows on most traditional systems will only be picked up as not having been inseminated at the end of joining or open – too late to fix. If 15% of cows are not cycling you cannot get a high submission rate.” He says that the MooMonitor+ picks up a lot of heats which otherwise would have been missed, for example short heats at night or heats where the animal did not get ridden by other animals for some reason. “In this way on most herds it pushes up submission rate, improves the calving pattern and gets heifer calves on the ground early which helps them come back in the herd in two years. MooMonitor+ also means that it doesn’t matter as much who you employ, who gets the cows in or who milks the cows as the electronic stock person is always keeping an eye on them.”
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MooMonitor was first created in the early 2000s and was the first system to use very sensitive motion sensing to track animal behaviour 24/7 with the use of quick release collars fitted to the cows.
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