Computers, Coles and Cow Health
Dairy has come along way since I began farming over 30 years ago. Once upon a time (well, up until just recently) we’d have to use our eyes and ears to pay attention to cow health, now we’ve got a computer to do that for us. We’ve just installed a Cow Manager program that collects data for each cow through a sensor clipped to each cows existing ear tag. The sensor tells us how far that animal has walked each day, how much she has eaten, her body temperature and even when she feels like a bit of nookie with a bull.
Fitting sensors to 1100 cows was quite the mission but now that it's up and running and though we are still very much in the beginner stage of learning this program, we can already see the potential this program will have to our future farming practices. The computer identifies cows that are out of normal cow specifications and tells you to inspect this cow as she is sick. It even tells you if she is moderately or critically ill. It has already picked up some quite sick cows that we were not aware of. Learning how to interpret the data will be our big challenge. It’s as simple as going to the computer each morning to see a list of cows the program has identified as ill. The challenge is that when you draft them they don’t always look sick and cow communication is limited.
Our biggest issue so far is that there are seven solar powered reading stations around the farm that pick up the data as the cows walk past and send it back to the main computer at the dairy. We are down to two operational ones as the correllas have eaten the wiring and antennas out of the rest. We have birds in such numbers they are not easily displaced so we are installing flexible steel cabling and bird spikes on the poles so they cannot hold onto the pole while they nibble away. Installation of new things is rarely seamless but I think overall this technology will be a game changer for us-it better be, I could have moved to the south of France with the price tag!
The grass season is finishing, our last lot of silage will be done this week and we will have conserved about 2500 Dry tonne or 7500 wet tonne of vetch and grass silage. It’s not really enough, we will have to grow some summer crop. I’m not a fan, my irrigation season already runs for about 150 days and I don’t not take kindly to having to extend it by watering over the summer but we don’t have a lot of choices. The old rule is a cow giving 6000 litres of milk needs 6 tonnes of dry matter, a cow giving 7000 litres needs 7 tonnes of dry matter. 1100 cows multiplied by 7 tonnes means our farms needs 7700 dry tonnes of feed to feed the milking herd (that only feeds the milkers not the young ones and random beef ones that seem to hang about).
Of that 7 tonne for each cow about 2 tonnes comes from grain (wheat or barley) about 2 tonnes comes from silage and the rest comes from grass or hay or a bit of canola meal. The cows are smoking at the moment, our milk production is up as we sent away 25,000 litres to Noumi yesterday, plus we used 1200 litres for calf feeding plus about 1000 litres went through the MEC to go into Bethune Lane Dairy.
And finally, a shameless plug, our chocolate milk has gone into Coles Swan Hill today and will land in a couple of Bendigo stores this week as part of our six month trial. We have to pass this trial to get rolled out state wide or nationally with Coles so if you felt your kids needed some chocolate milk I suggest you act and throw caution to the wind!