A sick cow can be easy to spot. She might be off-feed, have droopy ears, and seem slow to get up. Unfortunately, by the time a cow shows these and other signs of illness, she’s already suffering production losses and will require significant investment to restore her health. Advanced monitoring technology can help detect potential problems earlier, before physical symptoms appear. With prompt intervention, producers can improve health outcomes to achieve a profitable lactation and reproductive success.

Rumination and activity monitoring technology from Allflex Livestock Intelligence gives producers a 24/7 view of herd and individual cow health.

“Before, we’d have to send people out into the pens, and they would have to walk all the cows. With monitoring, we’re finding cows that normally the crew may have missed for a while,” says Monty Belmer, D.V.M., Waupun Veterinary Service, Waupun, Wis. Belmer says the system identifies specific problem cows within a pen so employees can find them more quickly and intervene more efficiently—and often more effectively.

“One of the biggest benefits is that we can treat a cow before she is sick and treat her that much quicker. The more data we have, the better decisions we can make,” says Marty Burken of Blue Hyll Dairy, Clinton, Iowa.

Identifying problem cows earlier often translates to supportive and lower cost interventions, potentially reducing the need for antibiotics or other invasive treatments.

Since installing the monitoring system, “Treatment costs have gone down drastically,” Burken says. Hear more from Burken and other dairy producers and veterinarians here.

On another dairy, monitoring and proactive intervention helped identify management changes that led to a 50% decrease in clinical mastitis.

“When we see cows that are off-feed, they could be mastitis cows. We just don’t know it yet,” says Stephen Banta of Shamrock Farms Organic, Stanfield, Ariz. “We pull them out and treat them so they never present themselves as mastitis cows.”

“That’s a major benefit of this Allflex system. It’s going to help identify where some of your blind spots or management holes are, and help you fix them,” Banta says.

Monitoring systems also benefit fresh cow health by generating data that allow managers to focus their time on cows that need attention. The Allflex system generates easy-to-understand daily reports of cows to investigate, so you don’t need to wade through pages of data or lock up cows unnecessarily looking for where the problems might be.

“For our fresh cow routine, we sit down at the computer and look at the cows we need to find. We don’t need to lock everybody up for an hour while we temperature probe them, like we used to,” says Seth Atwater of Atwater Farms, Barker, N.Y.

By providing real-time connections to individual cows, monitoring systems from Allflex Livestock Intelligence pay dividends with enhanced herd health and productivity. View videos and learn more about how monitoring can benefit your operation at www.allinonallflex.com.