STOCK TECHNOLOGY
Alicia and Mark look at the herd’s data as it comes in.
Ears to the ground Technology in the form of CowManager plays a major part in the operation on the Adams’ Otago farm. Story and photos by Karen Trebilcock.
T
here’s no tail paint on Mark and Tracey Adams’ dairy farm at Woodside near Dunedin. There are no bulls either. What is there are seven solar-powered routers on fence lines throughout the 140ha farm and all of his 400 cows have orange CowManager tags. And Mark’s phone goes “moo”, even in the middle of an interview with the Dairy Exporter, to tell him a cow has come on heat. “It’s a non-cycling too,” he says smiling, checking the graph of the cow’s activity on the phone’s screen. Mating this year has been anything but normal for Mark and his two staff. CowManager tells them which cows are 70
on heat, they’re drafted through Protrack and inseminated, with the LIC technician saying all of the cows submitted are definitely on. There are few short returns, if any, as well. “It’s just taken all of the pressure off,” Mark said. The technician uploads the mating information on the DataMATE app before he leaves and it arrives in MINDA and then is uploaded in Cowmanager within a minute or so. Mark can check on his phone which cow has been mated with which bull even before the dust has settled on the tanker track. Submission rates have been about the same as last year but last year he used CIDRs on 15% of the herd.
He’s hoping CowManager will lower his not-in-calf rate, which has stayed stubbornly high over recent years. Wanting to use short gestation semen over his late cyclers to bring calving dates forward, Mark has been keen to get rid of bulls on the farm for a while. He tried FlashMates two years ago but it didn’t help and, wanting to make picking cow heats easier, he’s turned to CowManager. CowManager, supplied in New Zealand by Senztag for the past seven years, is used on more than 100 farms so far with 20 of them in Southland and Otago under the care of Alicia Keown. While the hardware comes from Germany, the United States and the
Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | January 2021
