Dairy system monitors calf health from birth

RAHWAY, N.J. — Dairymen have a new way to continuously monitor the health of their calves with the SenseHub Dairy Youngstock system.

“This covers the phase we didn’t have — from birth to 12 months of age,” said Brandt Kreuscher, dairy business development manager for North America for Merck Animal Health.

“We needed better information to understand how we can do a better job,” said Kreuscher during a webinar hosted by the Dairy Calf and Heifer Association. “We believe by finding animals objectively and consistently every day will make a difference.”

“We don’t diagnose sickness or detect sickness,” he said. “We find animals that are having an abnormal day and present that population.”

Every dairy calf is potentially a sick calf.

“Our goal is to get the calves that don’t need you out of the way, so you can spend more time on the population of calves that need attention,” Kreuscher said.

The system works for both group housed and individually housed calves from birth to weaning.

“The calves must be nipple fed,” Kreuscher said. “We look at the animal behaviors that we expect and compare those behaviors to the individual animal’s behavior.”

Every minute the tag tracks the predominate behavior of the calf.

“The tag stores that behavior and every 20 minutes it downloads that behavior for each animal, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Kreuscher said. “We can see what’s happening in terms of suckling and different behaviors associated with suckling.”

Once the animal is moved to a new group after weaning, the settings automatically change to Youngstock weaned algorithms.

“At 12 months of age, it transitions automatically to breeding age algorithms,” Kreuscher said. “So, the same tag will monitor breeding age heifers and mature cows.”

The system is a seamless process, the dairy business development manager said.

“We have a scanner that scans the tag so it is assigned to the calf automatically, there is no handwriting,” Kreuscher said.

“If the tag is assigned at birth to two days of age, we will find a calf that’s not having a normal day in 27 hours,” he said. “The tag machine learns what it expects the calf’s normal to be, but if the tag goes on after day four, it will take seven days to baseline.”

A health index of 100 is a perfectly healthy calf. Above a health index of 86 is a normal day.

“SenseHub finds calves below a health index of 86 and puts them in a subset so people can find those calves,” Kreuscher said. “We record the calf had a health event automatically into the system.”

An LED light blinks on the tag when the calf needs attention.

“We can activate the LED light based on your schedule,” Kreuscher said. “We can schedule the LED light to blink when your treatment crew is moving through the calves.”

This blinking light can be set by group and the duration for the lights to stay on can also be customized to fit the dairy operation.

“There is tremendous flexibility because the goal is to help the employees find the calves,” Kreuscher said.

The movement from individual to group housing, the dairy business development manager said, is one of the most challenging periods for the calves.

“A lot of the problems we see when we move calves to groups are problems that began as a calf in the suckling group and manifested itself with the stress change into the larger groups,” Kreuscher said.

“The movement to a large group is a very difficult for the calves, but if you indicate that group change, we can find calves not having a normal day in the group 25 hours after the group change,” he said.

When detection of a calf problem lags, it becomes extremely expensive for the dairy operation.

“If I see a calf that doesn’t meet the average daily gain threshold now,” Kreuscher said, “it tells me I should have addressed that calf at some point.”

“The most expensive calf we raise is a calf that made it through the system, but didn’t thrive,” Kreuscher said. “And we don’t understand why the cow is a poor performer, but if we could have found that calf and addressed it earlier, that would not have been the case.”

“The goal when we raise calves is to give them the best experience we can,” he said. “We’re not trying to replace good people, but we’re trying to make good people as effective as they can be every day.”