Focus on the Pen, Not Individual Cows, to Deliver Profits
Monitoring what’s happening at the pen level, rather than for individual dairy cows, is proving to be the best approach for producers with more than 1,000 cows. It allows them to prevent and predict health or feeding issues cost effectively, and hence, increase farm profitability. The ‘power of the pen’ philosophy is leading to changes in how farms feed, vaccinate and manage their cows. Technology is enabling and in fact accelerating this trend.
Farmers have spent hundreds of years checking up on each cow, making sure they are fed and that workers are following best practices. While this is effective for herds of 20, 100, or even 200 cows, the approach is very time-consuming, requires a lot of labor, and is being replaced by time-saving technologies and innovations which eliminate human errors as farms increase in size.
Activity monitors, robots, milk sensors, and smart cameras in the barn and parlor are just some of the technologies arriving on U.S. Dairy farms, with the promise of monitoring feed, drinking, milk quality, heat detection, and disease.
Read the full article by Aidan Connolly with Dairy Herd Management here.
