When AFL Women's player, Shelley Scott, of Geelong Football Club, is travelling, she uses technology to monitor her cows and avoid missing health issues.
Ms Scott milks a split-calving herd of 130 cows off 80 hectares in a 10 double-up dairy, at Gerangamete, in the Colac, Vic, district.
The three-way cross herd of Montbeliarde, Friesian and Jersey cows is joined using artificial insemination over three weeks, followed by mop-up Angus bulls. Calving period is 12 weeks, including heifers. The cow herd calves over 10 weeks.
"Calving is March/April and August/September," Ms Scott said. "With two-thirds of the herd calving in autumn, this enables me to back off to milking 100 cows in the winter."
She rears all the calves. The dairy heifers are herd replacements and the dairy steers and dairy-beef calves are grown out to 12-14-months-old and sold.
Sorghum, millet and rape crops are grown for forage and sometimes harvested for hay. Ms Scott makes her own pasture silage. Paddock renovation is normally preceded with a chicory crop, oversown in the autumn with ryegrass.
Fertiliser is applied across the farm in autumn and early winter, with a paddock top up in spring.
Dams are used to irrigate a summer sorghum crop.
Health monitoring system
The dairy is a basic setup, with no auto drafting nor cup removers, but Ms Scott is interested in upgrading gradually. To this end, when she decided to invest in a health-monitoring system, Ms Scott chose one that could be integrated with automatic drafting and other infrastructure upgrades, including milk metering.
Ms Scott chose the Allflex Dairy Monitoring System and it was installed in late 2021. She chose collars for her cows and puts them on her heifers when they are a month out from calving.
The system relies on internet connectivity and the collars can store up to 24 hours of data, which is uploaded to cloud-based software when the cows are close enough to an antenna at the dairy.
"I was looking for a system that would keep an eye on the cows when I wasn't here," Ms Scott said.
"I work off farm and I also live off farm, and I wanted to be able to check on the cows regularly."
The cloud-based data is available on her computer and on an app on Ms Scott's phone, which she can access any time of day or night.
"It's peace of mind when I'm away on game weekends, particularly over the six months when I'm playing," Ms Scott said. "That's often during calving."
For six months of the year, Ms Scott relies on family members to back up as relief milkers on game day or the surrounding travel days for away games.
"I also want to be using sexed semen in the future, and I think the Allflex system can help me so I'm not wasting time with AI," Ms Scott said.
"I want to be more selective about the herd and confident I'm getting sexed semen into my best 40 cows."
Allflex technician Clancy Jordan said the Allflex Dairy Monitoring System worked by measuring rumination. System confidence related to the tens of thousands of hours of cows being monitored that translated into accurate algorithms.
"The algorithms turn existing data into helpful information, that then provides the farmer with actionable insight that they can apply on the farm," he said.
"The Health Report clearly identifies a cow, her number, and flags her on a health report - on that health report is an index that identifies how urgently she requires attention."
The algorithms identify if the cow has slowed her activity or decreased or increased her rumination.
"The Health Report also identifies when a cow is actively in oestrus, and the breeding window you have that identifies accurately when she should be inseminated," Mr Jordan said.
Ms Scott looks at the rumination from a nutrition perspective.
"If Shelley decides to make a feed change in the dairy, she can measure if that is making a difference or not to rumination, and if that makes a difference in the vat," Mr Jordan said.
Ms Scott said the biggest challenge was learning how to adapt her feeding system against the increased amount of data available to her.
"The Allflex app helps me to manage feed quality, and the critical periods of transition feeding and early calving," she said.
"Initially I was reading a really high rumination. It's because I was calving in the autumn and grazing the herd on a summer crop, and I was still feeding the same amount of silage.
"I thought I had to keep the rumination up.
"When I backed it off 30 minutes a day, production picked up, probably one litre per cow.
"I learned I was feeding the cows too much silage.
"And when I fed them less silage, I was able to stretch that silage out further. We had a longer winter here, and the additional silage in storage helped get the herd through that weather."
It also meant less labour time was spent feeding out silage unnecessarily in the late summer and autumn.
Plan to tighten calving
Ms Scott hopes to use the Allflex collars to tighten her calving.
"I want to reduce it as tight as I can," she said.
"The spring herd calved over five weeks. It makes a big difference, especially that first three weeks. I'd rather have a short intense calving period.
"I'm learning to use the system to identify when rumination activity is spiking.
"The system sends me an alert when the cow is coming into season, and a line of when is peak joining time and when the spike has dropped off.
"I can compare that with my other data, from years of joining and calving, and compare it to identify cows that are coming into season regularly every 21 days."
When Ms Scott notices a drop in rumination it's an indicator that cow will begin calving.
"If I'm away and get that alert, I can get someone to go check on the springer herd or the dry herd and check out the cow," she said.
The critical factor for Ms Scott is milk fever, something with which she is experienced. The Allflex algorithm has helped her to improve her management of milk fever.
"I've always got a few cows with milk fever," she said.
"Wet winters make it worse. It's the type of condition that helps spur my decision to look at and monitor the system.
"If I see a little dip in her Health Report prior to calving, I can track the graph for those critical periods and try to avoid the cow going down with milk fever in the paddock.
"Rather than have her go down in the paddock, I'll treat her or keep her close by, so she can be monitored and prevented before symptoms arise.
"I can be proactive in my decision making, and because I got the health alert I can take action earlier rather than too late."
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