A Year in the Life of a Farmer: High-tech collars improve cow care

Follow the Mitchell family throughout the entire year. Each month, look for updates about the family members and the decisions they make on their farm.

WINNEBAGO, Ill. — Individually monitoring animals helps dairymen improve health care and reproduction management for their herds.

“We have rumination and heat monitoring collars that can tell us how many minutes per day the cows are ruminating and it also tracks their activity compared to the baseline normal for that particular cow,” said John Mitchell who together with his brother, Aaron, are partners in Mitchell Dairy and Grain LLC.

“If a cow is down in activity or rumination, she is likely sick, lame or not feeling good,” he said. “They are really good for an individual view of each cow without having to lay eyes on them.”

For example, Mitchell said, today’s health report had five cows on it.

“I can focus on those five cows when I go out to the barn,” he said.

The Mitchells have used the neck tags on the collars for their breeding-age heifers for about five years and for their cows for the past two years.

“We had a different version on our cows before we expanded our herd, for heat and activity monitoring in the 2010-2011 time frame,” John Mitchell said.

Collars are placed on the heifers at about 11 to 12 months of age.

“They stay on until they are 60 days or so confirmed pregnant and checked twice by the vet and then we take them off,” Mitchell said. “At three to four weeks before calving, the heifers get a collar and it will be on them for the rest of their life.”

The tags on the collars send information continuously to the computer program through wireless transponders. Two transponders are used on the farm — one at the farm’s office for the freestall barn and a second one near the heifer barn.

“This is an advancement from the original technology that used readers by the milking parlor that the cows had to walk under,” Mitchell said. “Now I don’t have to wait until the cow is milked to see what she’s done for the last eight hours.”

When a cow is in heat, Mitchell said, her activity increases dramatically, 10 times as much as usual and her rumination will decrease.

“One of the biggest differences from using the collars from the reproductive standpoint is the average days open before they get pregnant has dropped from 130 days in milk to 110 days now and we have also changed the voluntary waiting period from 60 days and now it’s about 85 days,” he said. “We have really narrowed the window for when most of our cows are getting pregnant.”

The dairymen use a PC Dart computer program that comes from their milk processing company to keep track of milk testing information and milk production records, as well as breeding information and all herd health records.

“The milk tester comes to the farm once a month to take samples that get tested for butterfat, protein and somatic cell count and that gets fed back into the DHIA database,” Mitchell said.

“It all works together for the scheduling of breeding hormone shots and vaccinations which makes it easier to keep track than on a breeding wheel or with a paper notebook,” he said. “As we’ve increased the herd size, we are much more structured for doing things like drying cows off every Thursday or giving vaccinations every Tuesday.”

Years ago, when the Mitchells milked 100 cows, they would typically vaccinate the herd once in the spring and again in the fall.

“Now we will vaccinate 10 cows every week rather than trying to do a large group all at once,” John Mitchell said. “That keeps us on a good schedule to get things done correctly.”

Mitchell uses the Pocket Dairy app on his phone to look at information on individual cows whenever he desires.

“I can tell which group the cow is in, her milking status, breeding status and all her health records for her whole life,” he said.

Just recently Mitchell treated a cow for pneumonia and he wondered if she had been sick before.

“I looked at her record and on March 14, 2021, I was treating her for a respiratory infection,” he said. “The rumination report caught that cow before I even noticed she was sick and she’s in my fresh cow group that I look at every day.”

In the milking parlor at the farm, automatic detachers are used to remove the milking machines from the cows.

“There is a sensor in the milk line that reads the flow rates for each cow,” Mitchell said. “Once the flow rate drops below a certain number of pounds per minute, it will turn the vacuum off and pull the machine off the cow.”

Prior to milking, a FutureCow Teatscrubber brush is used by the milkers for udder preparation.

“It sprays on the disinfectant, brushes off the teats so they’re clean and helps with stimulation for milk let down,” Mitchell said.

The dairymen are considering the purchase of a feed management software program.

“It is something we’ll probably do by the end of the year,” Mitchell said.

Currently, he programs recipes for rations into the TMR mixer on a per head basis and it determines how many pounds of each ingredient should be added to the mixer.

“Now we’re looking into an integrated program to do more tracking of what is loaded in the mixer to keep inventories on all the feedstuffs,” he said.

The new program will track when a truckload of a feed is delivered to the farm, the price of that feed and how many days it is available to be fed.

“We’re doing the inventory tracking portion by hand at this point,” Mitchell said. “And our banker wants an updated balance sheet and a lot of that is feed inventory at different times of the year, so this program will make it a lot easier to generate that report.”

Mitchell is expecting a good year for the dairy industry.

“We have pretty high forage quality and we have a big investment in raising our forages with fertilizer and crop protection,” he said. “That is already paid for at this point, so we don’t have to purchase as much feed and we hope that will allow us to build up a little reserve.”

In addition, milk prices have increased since a year ago.

“Our milk price for January was $24.82 compared to 2021 when we got $17.90,” Mitchell said.

Part of the increase in price is a result of stronger milk components.

“Our haylage from last year is really high quality and we are feeding more fat because the milk prices are higher so that justifies the extra inputs in the ration,” Mitchell said. “Our butterfat is now at 4.27 versus 3.88 a year ago.”