Cow collars saved the day when Mark Shefford’s herd broke a fence down and went on a feeding rampage in a paddock of fodderbeet. As any farmer knows, fodderbeet, fed incorrectly, can be devastating for cows.
“We were able to use the data on the collars to save cows,” Shefford said.
“It wasn’t so much on the first day when there were 278 alerts, but by day eight there were eight or nine cows coming in with health alerts.
“We were able to treat them to get them back going again. We lost four cows and without the collars, we would have lost a lot more, I’m sure of it.”
The 39-year-old dairy farmer was a former lower-order sharemilker for Geoff Hay. He ran two herds on two farms – 840 cows through a 60-bail rotary at Waimate, and 400 cows through a 30-a-side herringbone dairy at Morven.
“The logistics alone made mating manic and unrelenting,” Shefford said.
But three years ago, Hay made the move to fit both herds with heat and health monitoring collars.
Collar monitors read movement 24/7, showing each cow’s activity and in turn alerting farmers to heats and potential health problems.
“I made a deal with myself that the day we put those collars on I was not going to buy another bucket of tail paint. I’ve kept that deal,” Shefford said.
His goal was to improve the six-week in-calf rates from 68 per cent (done solely on visual heat detection).
He added 250 straws of sexed semen on the last season to make the challenge more interesting. His six-week in-calf rate lifted by 8 per cent to 76 per cent.
“When it comes to the collars, using sexed semen is definitely a no-brainer for me. Ideally, I’d like to mate with sexed semen twice a day over the top 370 production cows in the herd,” Shefford said.
There have been two other areas where he said the collars were game-changers – the colostrum herd and general health alerts throughout the lactation.
“Animal health is a big thing, especially during calving when you’re busy. Probably the bigger one for animal health is the cow’s rumination and where we’d like that to be before we let them leave the colostrum mob.
“I can also follow the progress of cows who have been calved in their first 10 days as a group.”
Shefford said the collars also eliminated under-performing cows from the herd.
“The one thing we don’t have any more is those really sick cows that can hang around the farm just until they are well enough to go to the freezing works. The collars allow us to get on top of those health issues earlier, so we avoid potentially losing those cows.”

• By Pat Deavoll