What to look out for when buying a sorting gate?
Reliability, free cow traffic and maintenance play important roles.
Reliability, free cow traffic and maintenance play important roles.
Suppose your monitoring system indicates that a cow is in heat or has a health condition. Then, of course, the next question is: where do I find that cow? How convenient and efficient if you can then rely on the fact that all cows with an attention are already in the separation pen for immediate insemination or treatment. However, all sorting systems are not created equal. Martin van Middelkoop takes us through the development of the SmartSort and reveals some important things to look out for when buying.
“The biggest advantage of a sorting gate is obviously the time savings for the farm workers and for the cows” shares Martin van Middelkoop, Market Solution Manager at Nedap. Together with his team, he has worked on perfecting the SmartSort in recent years. “A sorting gate is also safer and more hygienic than walking among the cows to cherry pick individuals needing attention. But you have no use for a sorting gate if you cannot be fully confident that all the cows on the selection list are actually sorted,” he points to the frustration of dairy farmers with bad experiences in the past. “From the starting point of excellence in reliability, we developed the SmartSort.”
Van Middelkoop explains how the system works and the choices Nedap made in doing so. “The SmartSort recognizes the cow based on RFID recognition in the neck tags. If the cow is listed, the gate – thanks to superfast data transfer – opens instantly and with free passage towards the separation area.”
Unlike other systems, the SmartSort does not need auxiliary sensors for cow recognition. This makes sorting faster. In systems with auxiliary sensors, the cow often has to wait before a second gate opens, which causes agitation. “In the SmartSort, there is one recognition point, few moving parts and free cow traffic. So no stress for the cow, low maintenance and high capacity,” Van Middelkoop explains. Important points to judge a system on.
Another difference from existing sorting systems is the easy installation, as the SmartSort is already largely pre-assembled and factory-tested for operation. “We deliberately chose this to minimize the risk of errors and malfunctions and to make it easier for the installer,” Van Middelkoop explains. “Many things like the distance from the antenna to the gate are very precise. If that deviates by just an inch, it can result in malfunctions or unreliable selections. This annoys the dairy farmer and costs the service engineer a lot of time and money. We prevent this because the SmartSort is already assembled at these crucial points in Nedap’s workshop. That can’t go wrong in assembly and gives 99.9% reliability in practice.”
In the SmartSort, there is one recognition point, few moving parts and free cow traffic. No stress for the cow, low maintenance and high capacity.
The reliability of the SmartSort is also evidenced by the extensive testing phase on dairy farms. The SmartSort was tested on mid size farms as well as farms with many thousands of cows in a conventional parlor setting, as well as on farms with a grazing system and seasonal calving cycle. “On the latter type of farms, flawless selection is very important,” Van Middelkoop explains. “Those cows pass through the milking parlor and sorting gate twice a day and spend the rest of the time in the pasture far away from the farm. If you then miss a cow in heat, it is very difficult to inseminate her in time. That can lead to culling if she does not get pregnant within the desired time frame.”
On large dairy farms, the SmartSort provides enormous labor savings. With a proud smile, Van Middelkoop cites another great response from a dairy farmer who deployed the SmartSort on his farm with 2,500 cows: “The entrepreneur was a bit piqued. He wondered what alternative tasks he should give his staff now that they were no longer busy looking for cows that their previous sorting system had missed,” he concludes with a wink.
