Background
Located on "the thumb of Michigan" in Tuscola County, Paramount Dairy was founded in 2004 by Brent Robinson. Beginning with just 30 cows, Paramount quickly grew in size to reach its current herd of 1,250 milking cows and 900 heifers. A dairy and grain farm, Paramount grows about 1,200 acres of corn and alfalfa which it uses to feed its large herd.
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Challenges
Brent Robinson, Paramount's owner, is a Cargill nutritionist and so was initially interested in monitoring rumination as a way to gain intelligence on his herd's nutrition. Pretty quickly, he and his farm manager, Brent Moyer, realized there were other challenges that could also be addressed.
Aiming for a 30,000 lb rolling average for the herd, Moyer was looking for ways to improve health management and to enhance the breeding program. As a first step, he wanted to start breeding Paramount's cows with higher genetic value bulls - a step that his AI technician was not ready to take.
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System
After the dairy's management met with representatives from Semex and SCR, Paramount chose the SCR Heatime® Pro System with SCR Heatime HR tags, primarily for the rumination monitoring. At first, tags were used to monitor pre-fresh cows, fresh cows and breeding cows. An additional tags were added a few months later.
SCR's heat detection and rumination monitoring are used daily at Paramount Dairy.
"Rumination monitoring is the most used part of the system – the heat detection is just an added benefit,"Moyer says. "A healthy cow is going to make more milk and get pregnant and start all over again. Rumination monitoring helps you focus on the critical period when you might have a lot of problems, and helps you prevent them." Indeed, the reasons that Paramount added tags to its initial purchase was to reduce the number of lost pregnancies on unverified animals by identifying problems sooner and to enable health monitoring of more cows.
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Benefits
In the initial period after installation, Paramount's AI technician refused to breed according to the guidance provided by the SCR system.
Whenever the system flagged cows that the AI technician had not identified as being ready for AI, Moyer bred those cows himself. The results of his own breeding efforts on cows that were missed by the technician, quickly built Moyer's trust in the SCR system – and enabled him to confidently let the AI technician go. Moyer explains: "We trained inside people and saved the cost of the hired technician. The SCR system will help us make the management and breeding decisions to support our goals for raising milk production across the herd."
"With the SCR system, Paramount is saving significant time in both health management and heat detection. The fresh cow protocol is now faster and more effective. "We were going through a fresh cow protocol every day but now we do it every other day so this has cut the time in half," says Moyer. "Once we treat, we check the graphs the next morning to see if she's coming up or going down. If rumination is going up, then we know the treatment is working – we don't have to guess."
Moyer has noticed a correlation between the rumination activity of the pre-fresh cows and their post-fresh recovery. "If we see a dry cow who fluctuates a lot in her rumination,about 75% of the time, after she calves she going to have metabolic problems. So, this enables us to predict which cows are going to have problems, so we can get onto them in the first two to three days after calving and prevent headaches."
In addition, the system has helped streamline breeding and improve heat detection accuracy. "We check the system in the morning first thing and we breed the cows it says are ready. Our heat detection rate rose by 25% within a couple of months after we started working with the SCR system stayed the same – and our pregnancy rate stayed the same – so we're breeding more cows," added Moyer.
Moyer sums up: "I am a firm believer in rumination monitoring. It would be hard to go back to milking cows without it."
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