Just six months after installing the SCR system, Bowman is well on the way to recovering the costs. “I budgeted a four-year repayment, but at the rate we are going now, I think it will be 12-18 months,” he says. “On rumination alone, the system is saving us about $7,000-$8,000 a month.”Due to the highly accurate, automated heat detection, the dairy now successfully breeds 82% off standing heat, a complete turnaround from when it relied almost completely on a synch
program. “Even though we still have 18% on shots because they don’t show heat, we’ve gotten rid of 75% of our reproductive drugs.”The savings are amplified when time spent on heat observation and fresh cow management is taken into account. “We used to watch heifers two hours a day to see who’s in heat, but now I spend maybe 10 minutes. You look at the charts, you sort and you breed,” says Bowman.

 

The SCR health reports have significantly reduced the daily health observation workload, particularly on fresh cows. And, by using the rumination measurements to assess response to treatment, Funk has gained actionable, money-saving insight. “We realized we were over-treating about half of our mastitis cows, and we have since reduced drug costs by about one-third on severe cases of mastitis,” says Funk. “Also, before SCR, we would drench cows with ketosis twice a day for two weeks. Now, in the second week, we usually drench only once a day and sometimes, the system tells us they’re healthy enough to not need further treating.”In addition, the SCR system has taken the guesswork out of how utritional changes are affecting the cows, improving the Funks’ decision making. For example: “We recently put meadow grass in the ration. When we looked at the rumination, we could tell the hassle was not justified.”

 

“The rumination option on the SCR system has given us a lot of value. It helps us to detect cows that are not just sick, but cows that don’t take off after calving. If a cow is getting sick we can catch it about a day earlier than we used to, before seeing it in lower milk production. If we put her on medication, we’ll know much faster if she’s getting better or not. We do feel like we’ve avoided a lot of DAs or more serious problems with fresh cows because we’re able to stay on top of the animals a lot more and knowing what’s going on. And we’re able to see how heat affects our herd on the rumination side, along with new feeds that we may supplement in.

 

“On average I’m saving 1.5 to two hours a day [on visual observation]. It’s made my life a lot easier. It’s much more accurate, so we’re catching more animals in heat and breeding more of them. We used to ov-synch about 40% of animals and now it’s down to about 10%.

 

“The biggest thing is peace of mind. There’s no more guessing. Now I’m breeding a cow and I know the timing is right.”

 

Farm manager Michael Jones of Wyndhurst Farm in North Somerset has tried virtually all the heat detection aids available and naturally he greeted claims from the latest electronic based system to be installed at his unit with a degree of scepticism.

 He is one of the first farms in the UK to use the system and after just six months of use, Mr Jones is rating it right up there with great dairy innovations like the feeder wagon.

 

“We have used almost every heat detection method to get our submission rate up to a high level. The HEATIME is watching 24 hours a day for us and I have become very reliant on it in a few months.

 One of the big benefits is that it has taken the stress out of the constant pressure to catch cows bulling. It has given us more time to concentrate on other management jobs with the cows.
HEATIME was put in during March, so really we were at the end of our SERVICE period. The idea was that throughout this summer we would learn how to read the graphs and how you work out if the cows are cycling properly.

 I now have a great deal of confidence that the system will pick up cows in heat whether we see them or not.
We put a collar on a MATURE cow that had calved in October and had not been seen bulling AT ALL, so really she was destined to be culled, but the HEATIME system picked her up and she is now in calf. That has saved a high yielding cow, its £1,000 replacement cost and she will hopefully produce a calf for either herd replacement or sale.
It’s too easy to go to extended lactation with high genetic cows, but you can very suddenly find you are 20 calves down. With replacement costs, lost dairy replacement calf sales that is a big figure to take out of the bottom-line for any farm.

Dairy farming is all about becoming more efficient, we have cut costs like every dairy farmer. Our submission rates last winter were between 60-65%, and I would be happy with a 10 % increase using this system, but I’m now fairly certain we can achieve 80% or even the 90% claimed by the manufacture".

It has been two years now since I have first installed HEATIME, I am extremely satisfied and reimbursed. The reliability of this heat detection system is beyond the expected; more than 90% of the alarms are accurate. I have reduced calving conception interval to 40 days (from 170 to 130 days). Today I apply prostaglandin or other hormones in radical occasions in order to save money. This year, I have installed HEATIME on heifers too. It's a totally different world