Using Technology to Streamline Labor

Profile Picture of Post's Author Helen Korzec | Posted April 10, 2023

Often it is difficult to truly measure the return on investment of a herd monitoring system. Likely, everyone is aware of the savings on hormone injections and the ability to get cows pregnant quickly when they’re ready. The reproduction and hormone cost benefits that a farm may experience with putting in a monitor system are just one cost benefit.

In the last year I had a farm put in a herd monitoring system and noticed that once we started getting used to the system we had to seriously re-evaluate our labor force and day to day tasks.

To start, it separated the workers who were team players and willing to take a big change head on. For some workers, changing the day to day routine from walking cows looking for heats to trusting the computer system to tell them which cows to breed was just too much. This farm particularly noticed the managers and middle managers that were willing to jump right in, learn about the system and embraced the bumps in the road. The first point being, herd-monitoring systems showed the dairy a clear separation between the “change embracers” and the “change haters”. You might ask yourself why you’d want the “change embracer” vs. the “change hater”; dairy farming has its ups and downs and an employee that may not initially understand the change but is willing to try and streamline work is a far more effective team member than one who isn’t willing to embrace turbulence and change.

Herd monitoring systems could potentially reduce your FTE (full time employees), particularly if it is accompanied by a sort gate system. Workers can spend less time walking pens looking for heats and instead print the daily list, go out and breed the specific cows. If you install a sort gate the worker can simply stand at the sort area and breed the specific cows that the gate cut out for breeding. Cows that are sorted can be “worked on” and cows not needed can immediately go back to their pen to eat, lie down, and drink…without being locked and added stress of a human in their pen.

To further streamline you could use your system to early diagnose cows in need of attention by low rumination. Systems allow you to select how many rumination minutes are considered low, and will be flagged on a physical exam list. So, workers that previously had to walk pens, lock up and treat can simply use the list to go address specific animals in need. Even more streamlining can occur if you use the sort gate to automatically sort your low rumination cows into the sort area, depending on the size of your farm you could have a person at the sort area to breed and assess low rumination.

Prior to putting in a herd monitoring system, I encourage managers to write out an organizational chart of employees and what their day-to-day tasks are. This will allow you to visualize all the jobs that need to be done and how a herd monitoring system could streamline the tasks and potentially reduce FTE.

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