3 Big benefits of Cow Locating
Stop searching and start finding the cows you need
Stop searching and start finding the cows you need
Finding an individual cow or even a list of cows in larger groups that need to be checked, inseminated, treated or fetched, sometimes feels like finding a needle in a haystack. Cow location technology can help reduce frustration, stress and lost time spent seeking specific animals.
Think of this technology like the ‘Find My Phone’ app for your smartphone. It automatically locates the cows you need and accurately pinpoints their real-time position on your barn map with one click – making your team infinitely more efficient. And it positively affects milk production and cow time budgets.
Here are three reasons to stop searching and start finding the cows you need:
Looking for cows is not the most fun part of the job on dairy farms. It often feels like a waste of time and something that could be done faster and more efficiently. Independent research on field farms by the State Research Center for Agriculture Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany, shows labor savings of 37% when finding and retrieving cows using Nedap CowControl with Cow Locating. Converted into dollars, an average farm with 320 cows saves $ 4,800 (approx. € 4,300) annually[1]. More than double the annual depreciation of such a system.
Good to add to this is that research by the Dutch Wageningen University & Research confirms that Nedap’s Cow Locating-system is very accurate. With an average accuracy of 1 ft (30.5 cm) you can find every cow right on the spot[2].
The ability to find specific animals quickly and accurately means your team can be more efficient with time. Instead of searching pens for an animal, they can spend their efforts on more mindful tasks like breeding and animal care. This holds true in conventional and robotic dairy facilities.
Also, employees can be more efficient with daily tasks. For example, instead of requiring two people to work pens – one in front to wand every cow for identification and another in the pen, cow-side – only one person is needed with cow locating. Additionally, personnel know exactly where an animal is located that may not have had a space in pen headlocks or was missed during sorting.
Cow locating technology frees up labor to do different jobs on the farm, jobs that sometimes are a higher priority than hunting down the animals you’re trying to find. Depending on how the technology is used, cow locating has been able to free up the equivalent of a full-time person to do other tasks on the farm.
Before investing in technology, it is of course important to involve the employees in the process and develop an implementation plan with them, so employees can feel it’s a part of their success and not a threat to their role or position on the farm.
Your personnel aren’t the only part of your farm affected by more targeted herd interactions. Cows benefit too. Less disruption to daily activities is an important outcome of more efficient cow locating. The fewer interactions you have with cows throughout their day, the better. Let her do what she likes to do – eat, drink and lay down. If you can easily and remotely find a cow, you don’t have to disrupt an entire pen looking for one out of 200 herd mates. It’s critical to minimize human-cow interactions and let cows be cows.
While it’s difficult to assign a specific price tag to reduced herd interactions, dairies report increased milk production of 1-2 pounds (0.5 to 0.9 kg) per cow per day thanks to less time away from feed and water for the whole group, not just those that require attention. On farms with 500 cows, that adds up quickly. It’s not just about those cows you need to find; it’s about all those other cows whose day you’ve influenced.
The good thing of cow location technology is that you don’t need to install it all at once. You can start with a tag that accepts location and the hardware can be added later. You can begin with one location or pen and add to your system over time. Facility layout and management styles play important roles in determining how cow locating fits into your dairy, but the highest priority areas should always be the cows requiring the most management. The technology fits most modern dairy facilities as long as you include infrastructure to mount a beacon, such as a barn or a fully supported sunshade. Transition pens, breeding pens and similar areas where cows require more attention are good places to initially install location system components. Pens for mid- to late-lactation cows can be added later if not included in the introductory installation.
The success of Cow Locating comes down to the data points you’re monitoring, your business goals, your labor force and how you want people to interact with your herd. Want to take full advantage of the many features our CowControl system offers? Then contact your local distributor.
[1] The study on the field farms showed the average labor time savings to be 2 minutes per cow per milking, for cows that did not come to the milking robot on their own. On an annual basis, this is 46 minutes per lactating cow x 320 cows = 245 hours. 245 hours x $ 19.60 = $ 4,802 labor cost.
[2] A validation study of Wageningen UR Livestock Research shows that the Nedap-system locates cows to an average accuracy of 1 ft, with a standard deviation of 0.82 ft, where an accuracy of about 16.4 ft could already be sufficient for finding an individual cow in the barn.
