“The team on the farm, including myself and Charlotte, were completely new to this herd in 2024, which needed some TLC to make things run more efficiently. After having a long discussion with the business owner, it was a group decision to upgrade the farm with the Datamars Active Tag heat and health monitoring system and drafting gate.
Having the drafting gate and collar system meant not having to focus on tail paint and scratch cards or spending time looking for bulling cows, giving us more time to focus on management and other areas of improvement e.g. lameness. This saved me around 6 hours per day!
The data we see within the app has been dependable, so much so that now we trust the system fully and allow the gate and the collars to pick the cows out for us to AI and check for health issues. We spent a lot of time at the beginning, making sure that we did night checks, writing down what we saw, and the system always found the same results.
Back-up and after sales service has been excellent. There is always someone at the end of the phone to help if something doesn’t seem right. The small tweaks to get the drafting gate to 99% read rate took a minimal amount of time and we are very pleased with the way it has run this past season.
In the first 6 weeks, we’ve gone from 205 to 343 to calve. That’s a 67% increase in previous breeding season figures! By bringing this number of cows forward into the first 6 weeks, we are putting another 58,000l in the tank, this is a significant increase to the farm, over £30,000 at today’s prices.
If a cow is flagged in the health alerts, or we notice her not looking her best, we can refer to the Datamars App to confirm our thoughts. These almost always align and help us with our decision on how to treat that animal. These health alerts have been key in helping us to get on top of lameness, which had previously been a concern.