Can we talk about technology that’s not as sexy? Now, I don’t mean that it’s not useful. I would even argue that this piece of technology is one of the most important pieces on our dairy farm. But it’s not as sexy as robots that mail cows or robots that mix and deliver feed to cows, which are really cool pieces of technology. But I would argue that this piece of technology makes our dairy way more efficient and way more profitable than some other things, other pieces of technology that are maybe a little more sexy.
So for our dairy, our heifers are housed about a mile down the road and are not on the main farm that the milk cows are on. So that means that we really need to rely on technology and on activity monitoring for our heifers. We also use it on our cows, but it’s especially important for our heifers and getting these animals to breed at the right age and get them caving in at the right age.
So how is this different compared to how we used to do it? So we’ve had the activity system for going on three years now. Prior to that, all of these heifers had to be timed, AI bred and Mercedar sank, and it required so many more man hours in order to get that accomplished and get it done. The downfalls of that, of course, you had to be using synchronization syndrome, you had to be using Cedars. It took time. You had to be doing it at a specific time window. So it didn’t matter if it was a blizzard or if it was raining or sleeting, that still had to be done.
No matter what the activity system, we’re able to breed all of our heifers off of natural heats, and we have more windows of flexibility. This is a look at the app and what it looks like in our phones of animals that are in heat. Couple of animals on here who we dried off yesterday. So naturally they had more, a more active day when they removed to the dry cow lot. So they’re showing up on the activity report, but it also shows animals that we are d and being that we are do not breed the animals so we can ignore those. And then it shows this cow who was bred yesterday. You can see she’s coming off her heat cycle, but pay close attention to that window of time. That marker moves along that scale of what is the ideal time to be inseminating animals. We’re able to be more labor efficient on our farm, we’re able to have less handling, we’re able to breed at the right time. In all honesty, we can avoid a harsh weather, like if we know that a rainstorm is coming at 2:00 and this animal needs to be bred sometime this afternoon, we can don’t, or after. We did not have that luxury when you’re talking about time breeding animals, you have to breed those animals at that specific time, doing it off their natural heat and using the activity system and monitoring them on Sense Hub gives us a lot more flexibility because we’re watching for that ideal window. And anytime within that ideal window, we’re very much, very consistent at caving in at 23 months of age. And we found that is the best age for our dairy. They perform the best and their first lactation after they cab. So that’s able to give us a steady flow of heppers caving all year round. Prior to the activity system, when we were really just breeding off of timed AI and cycling every one of them, oops, we would get slogs of heifers caving at once. And now we have a very even flow. The system also eliminates the need of a cleanup bowl for us, which I don’t even want to get into bowls. They’re dangerous. I don’t like them being on dairies. I don’t want them anywhere around me or any other person that needs to be here. So there’s absolutely no bowls on the farm for cleanup or otherwise.
And let’s talk about conception rate. So we are getting 60% first service conception rate on our happers. And that is all on sex . So I would absolutely, without a doubt, 100% recommend an activity monitoring system to any dairy farmer out there.
And for us, sensehub and the off flex system has been fantastic. Hey, the technical support is amazing. They’re on it. And I’m not just saying that to say that because there’s certainly plenty of other companies that we’ve all had to work with that do not provide that excellent customer service after the sale, and I’ve never had an issue. So all of that just ensures that we can make a lot more sugar plums.