When it comes to heat detection, Co. Armagh-based farmer who milks a 150-strong Holstein herd on her family holding, has lauded the reliability that SenseHub Monitoring Technology provides.
Claire Redmond, who farms just outside the village of Donaghcloney with her parents John and Karen Beckett, said:
“SenseHub looks after all our heat detection and does a fantastic job for us. We look after all our breeding – my father and I look after the management, paperwork and sire selection while my mother takes care of the AI – so we keep everything in-house.”
Having digested a broad range of industry feedback, Claire said that: “SenseHub was the most accurate product available when it came to heat detection.
“Going down that route meant we didn’t have to change all the collars; we were able to keep some of them while upgrading others so that lent to a smooth transition from the previous product we’d been using.”
Heat detection
SenseHub’s Dairy Monitoring Technology helps Claire and her parents to gain real-time insights into the health and reproductive status of their high yielding herd (10,000-11,000L annually) 24-hours a day, seven days a week.
This technology enables remote monitoring of key animal behaviour, including activity and rumination levels, allows farmers to detect heats, identifies cows that aren’t cycling, and assists in making more informed breeding decisions.
Claire continued: “Once we had SenseHub installed, we also started to monitor rumination, which proved very helpful, so the next step was to upgrade all the collars; I don’t think I’d appreciated how useful it was to monitor rumination until we had the system fully installed.
“It flagged up a lot of stressors that I knew were there, but really highlighted the importance of doing something about each of them.
“For example, changing cows between groups, transitioning cows out to grass and changing between clamps of silage, all of that became clearer thanks to SenseHub.”
In real time, SenseHub uses algorithms to analyse the activity, rumination, eating and key behaviours of cows and groups to provide actionable information on the reproduction, health, and wellbeing status of the animal.
This information is then displayed on the user-friendly SenseHub App.
When the cow is in heat, a farmer receives an alert to the SenseHub App. These animals are then presented in the animals in heat list
The Anestrus Report and Irregular Heat Report promptly detects animals that aren’t cycling or have irregular heats respectively.
SenseHub alerts farmers to animals which may have a health issue and the farmer can then present these animals to their vet for analysis, diagnosis and prompt treatment.
The SenseHub Ecosystem is designed with the farmer in mind, with all of its technologies connecting back to the SenseHub App.
This has helped to create a more connected farm and has empowered farmers with more proven, data-driven insights than ever before.
And with local dedicated on-farm sales representatives and technical support always available, help is on-hand from MSD Animal Health whenever farmers require it.
“For me, the biggest benefit of SenseHub is having information on my phone 24-7.
“All the updates, be it in terms of how cows are coming along or health alerts, it’s all readily available there. So it allows me to work off the farm, to have a family life and, to put it simply, to farm with more freedom.
“So my advice to other farmers? Installing SenseHub makes sense, it’s incredibly reliable and represents a worthwhile investment both in your farm and in yourself,” Claire stressed.
