Verifying Animal Care with Monitoring Data

By Dr. Glaucio Lopes

Trust, but verify. This long-standing philosophy has made its way from geo-political relationships to livestock operations as people want to know more about where their food comes from and how it was raised. Fortunately, dairy farmers have a long history of verifying what they do because animal monitoring has always been a component of good animal husbandry. Generations of dairy farmers have spent countless hours watching and caring for cows, then recording health events, treatments, estrus, breeding data and more.

As your grandfather’s hand-written records evolved into today’s digitized data, producers have gotten even better at tracking animal health and performance.

Technological Advances

Now, animal monitoring systems that track and record the predictive data of daily rumination and activity mean dairies are offered enhanced opportunities to improve animal care and well-being as they fine-tune their management cow-by-cow, group-by-group and for the entire herd—all at once.

The key to these systems is not total minutes ruminating or total activity, but the deviation from an established baseline.

By watching trends and monitoring reports, within a day and over time, dairies can identify which animals require intervention and evaluate the success of that intervention. The technology enables users to track the real-time evolution of health challenges and veterinary treatments.

The data also offers a starting point from which to begin deeper investigations into protocols and procedures to again ensure that animal well-being is the top priority. For instance, animal monitoring records help producers and their advisors better understand how animals adapt (or don’t adapt) to changes in housing, nutrition, health protocol updates and more.

Case Study

A 600-cow dairy near Merced, CA, recently used animal monitoring to help understand the effects of a health protocol. The increased knowledge led to a modification that resulted in improved animal care, as well as an improvement in performance.

Prior to the use of the animal monitoring system, the dairy moved far-off dry cows to a new pen—including a ration change—and performed a standard vaccination protocol.

They discovered that these were too many changes at once. Cows significantly dropped in rumination levels. Furthermore, health issues at calving likely resulting from previously undiagnosed problems during this timeframe were a challenge. The dairy frequently recorded a higher-than-desired level of cows calving early, which led to increased incidence of retained placenta and metritis and, ultimately, reduced reproductive performance in the following lactation.

“The technology really helped us see the impact of these stresses on the individual cows and the group,” says the dairy producer.

As a result, the dairy changed vaccination timing and cows responded with only slight rumination drops following the pen move and speedy recovery to baseline levels. Plus, since the management change, the dairy has experienced far fewer cases of retained placenta and instead of 25%-30% of cows calving early, that number has dropped to less than 5%.

The data clearly demonstrated that the action taken by the dairy was correct, and now they can verify the results.

More Opportunities to Affect Change

There are many opportunities presented by the superior monitoring capabilities of this technology. They range from modifying heat abatement scheduling to amending heat detection and breeding programs to analyzing nutrition and feed delivery protocols. All of which lead to potentially optimized animal well-being. Users are also able to focus health treatments/interventions and animal handling on animals that really need help versus those that do not require additional care—and have the data to back up these decisions.

This monitoring is especially critical during the transition period, since it allows dairy managers the ability to streamline their focus and hone in on those cows that are sick. And it means that cows that do not require additional attention are able to return to desirable eating and lying behaviors more quickly.

For example, research¹ conducted by Cornell University and presented at the 2015 American Dairy Science Association annual meeting demonstrated that rumination monitoring technology accurately identified displaced abomasum as early as three days before cows were identified by highly skilled dairy employees.

Further, rumination monitoring technology identified cases of ketosis about two days prior to physical symptoms and found cases of indigestion nearly a day before physical symptoms appeared.

Gaining a leg-up on these health challenges means that dairies have the ability to intervene early and activate proactive, preventive measures, rather than react, leading to healthier, more productive cows and employees.

In conclusion, animal monitoring data not only offer producers peace of mind, but are one more tool to give suppliers that same assurance regarding cow health and well-being. Dairy producers can verify what they do and why they do it. And that leads to increased trust—which is good for everyone.

1 Stangaferro ML, Wijma R, Medrano MM, Giordano JO. Prepartum rumination patterns in dairy cows that develop health disorders in the early postpartum period. American Dairy Science Annual Meeting. Abstract #T37. Available at: http://m.jtmtg.org/abs/t/64395. Accessed November 22, 2015.

Dr. Lopes is a SCR Dairy large herd manager and reproduction specialist.