CowManager’s Gerard Griffioen and Koen van Meurs with the Milk Sensor.

“Thanks to the Milk Sensor, farmers can stay one step ahead of udder health issues,” says Gerard Griffioen, dairy farmer and founder of CowManager. Mastitis not only affects milk production and animal health, it also affects profit. That is why preventing it is vital.

“When I was visiting one of our customers who milks about 125,000 cows, I saw his struggle with mastitis and the accuracy of his milk data. Cows were left unidentified and for them, no milk production data was available. And at the same time there was a wealth of data from other cows – but unreliable,” Griffioen recalls.

That’s how the idea for the Milk Sensor came about.

“Our Milk Sensor was developed in collaboration with dairy farmers,” says Koen van Meurs, Head of Product Development, enthusiastically.

Because the Milk Sensor measures at the teat level and CowManager has an extensive global network of large-scale dairy farms, a significant amount of data has been collected in a short amount of time.

Comparing our results with milk analyses from the lab was a big part of the development process and vital for ensuring maximum reliability. Artificial Intelligence, in combination with CowManager’s many years of experience with algorithms and large-scale data, resulted in a smart, advanced and reliable dashboard.

Five indicators in one Milk Sensor

The Milk Sensor currently has five indicators: temperature, conductivity, milk volume, milk flow and the vacuum level.

“The Milk Sensor is positioned very close to the udder to ensure reliable data. Milk quality has also been taken into account: the sensor ensures a clean, unobstructed milk flow. The system can be fully customized. Installation is quick and easy: cut the tube beneath the milk cup, slide the transparent sensor into place and reattach the tubes on either side of the sensor. This works with virtually any brand and type of milk cup in the milking parlor,” Gerard explains.

All data computer. CowManager’s Milk Sensor is available to all dairy farmers who have a CowManager ear sensor or who wish to purchase one. In the future, the Milk Sensor can also be upgraded with cow identification.

Left: CowManager Milk Sensor. Right: The Milk Sensor in action during milking.

Early detection and prediction of mastitis

Helping to detect and even predict mastitis is one of the Milk Sensor’s main features. Continuous monitoring of milking parlor performance has a positive effect on teat health and can prevent risk factors for mastitis such as teat tip calluses.

The Milk Sensor can also play a key role in producing milk with a low somatic cell count. Gerard and Koen are looking even further ahead.

“This preventive approach has a positive impact on animal welfare. It will help reduce culling due to high cell counts or mastitis problems,” the men predict. “This ultimately results in a longer lifespan for the cows,” Gerard explains.

Performance of each unit at a glance

Another main feature of the Milk Sensor is to analyze milking parlor performance down to the level of individual milk cups.

“The proper functioning of a milking parlor is essential for preventing udder problems. Blind milking, air in the milk or a low flushing temperature aren’t visible, but they can pose a huge risk when it comes to mastitis or a high bacterial count,” Koen explains.

The Milk Sensor monitors this and helps detect mastitis. The Milk Sensor also ensures continuity throughout the milking process when multiple milkers are involved. Any differences between milkers or milking sessions will immediately become visible.

“The combination of the ear and Milk Sensor and the accompanying sorting gate offers unprecedented possibilities,” says Gerard about the entire CowManager ecosystem. The Milk Sensor is a key component of the overall package.

But, according to Koen and Gerard, that’s not all. “This is just the first step. Eventually, the Milk Sensor will be able to measure even more parameters in both the milk and the milking parlor,” Koen reveals.

This innovative system provides real-time alerts for early disease detection and notifies producers when a calf may be falling behind its herd mates. With Youngstock Monitor and the new lightweight CowManager ear sensor, producers need just one sensor per animal for its entire lifetime, from calf to cow.

Powered by artificial intelligence with ever-evolving algorithms, Youngstock Monitor adapts to each operation and the behavioral development of each calf, allowing producers to make farm-specific predictions on the health of their individual calves and focus treatment in a targeted way.

Monitor Calf Health

The calf health alerts come in three levels: suspicious, sick and very sick, and detect subtle behavioral changes associated with illness often missed through visual observation. These alerts help facilitate quicker interventions, lower treatment intensity, reduce reliance on antibiotics and decrease mortality rates. Effective calf health management leads to increased future milk production and a healthier, more productive herd.

“With our innovative calf alerts, we can now monitor from calf to cow, for an animal’s entire lifetime. That is the CowManager vision”, says Gerard Griffioen, founder of CowManager. “This approach helps producers maximize performance and build the foundation for a productive and healthy herd.”

Innovation Award

Youngstock Monitor earned a Silver Medal Innovation Award at EuroTier 2024 and is now available in several countries.

Read on for more information on monitoring youngstock.

After receiving alerts from CowManager ear sensors, Sort my Cow allows producers to automatically or manually via the app divert cows that need attention, all while maintaining smooth cow flow and minimizing disruption to the rest of the herd. Its double ID system ensures fast, accurate sorting, and the pneumatic-free design features minimal noise during operation, helping to reduce cow stress. Sort my Cow is standard RFID compatible and integrates with DairyComp and PCDART for easy sorting via the CowManager app.

“More than just a gate, Sort my Cow is a cow-friendly service that seamlessly integrates CowManager ear sensor monitoring with smart sorting technology to reduce labor needs, increase efficiency, shorten lock-up times, and improve cow welfare and profits,” says Gerard Griffioen, founder of CowManager. “With Sort my Cow, producers don’t have to search for a cow that needs attention. If she’s on the list, she’ll be diverted one direction while the rest of the herd goes the other direction back to their pen. We’re thrilled to launch yet another tool to help producers stay one step ahead.”

Sort my Cow is crafted from premium U.S.-made stainless steel and uses electromagnets for locking, eliminating the need for a compressor. Built to last in extreme temperatures and tough conditions, it is designed with minimal points of mechanical wear and tear, ensuring durability and reliable performance. In addition, Sort my Cow is easy to install and requires only one day to set up the service.

Read more information about Sort my Cow.

Clear

The innovative system converts the collected cow data into clear graphs and alerts that are immediately available in a single overview. The dashboard also integrates our updated ‘insemination moment’, which displays the expected optimal insemination moment of the cow.

Customization

You can create a personalized overview using the drag-and-drop option. This allows you to put together your personal home screen, so it perfectly suits your priorities and working method. Moreover, this customized screen can be set as the default home page.

Trial Period

We offer a convenient option for inactive modules: To try out a different module, you can request a free trial period with just a single click.

More Information

• For information or questions about the dashboard, please send an email to support@cowmanager.com.
• Or check out more information on our Knowledge Base.

Koen van Meurs, Head of R&D at CowManager, explains: “Nutrition is of great importance to a cows’ performance. It also accounts for the largest portion of the variable costs on farms. Having the right insights to make data-driven decisions about feed and transition management, are key to successful and profitable farming. Machine learning technology helped us to create exactly these insights based on the behavior and temperature data we collected from millions of cows worldwide.”

Global customer panel

The Transition & Nutrition Module was designed with the help of dairy producers and nutritionists in our global customer panel. Wilfried Reuvekamp, member of the customer panel and owner of Hilltop Dairy (USA) says: “The insights provided by the Transition & Nutrition Module encouraged me to implement management changes, which led to a sustained dry matter intake of 38 lb. for our close-up cows. This has already contributed strongly to healthier fresh cows and higher peak milk production. I believe in a few months we will hit the 95 lb. milk production mark.”

Work preventively

The transition period is the primary risk period where 75% of all adult cow disease events occur. In the past producers could only dream of cows at risk being identified days or weeks before they became sick. Today this has become reality. Dry cows with decreased eating and rumination behavior will be flagged as being at risk of becoming sick after calving. Early intervention prevents losses and results in a healthier herd. All alerts within the Nutrition Module are designed to foster preventive management practices.

Optimize feed management

The Transition & Nutrition module consists of various easy-to-read graphs that offer full insight into the eating, rumination, and activity of each group of cows. The comparison functionality makes it easy to compare certain groups or time frames with each other, allowing the producer and nutritionist to evaluate the impact of ration changes and feed management in a fact-based and quick manner. Access to valuable herd data can be granted to trusted advisors through the MultiView function. The Transition & Nutrition Module provides producers with the tools to take feed and transition management to the next level. More control and full insights help producers achieve the goals they set for their herds with a better preg rate, higher health level, lower feed costs and more milk per cow.

About CowManager

Thousands of farmers in over 40 countries already rely on CowManager’s user-friendly ear sensor system, which helps to manage their herds. CowManager’s system monitors each cow 24/7, it is an extra pair of eyes on the herd. This valuable management tool shows real-time alerts via easy-to-read and colored hourly behavior graphs on your smartphone or desktop computer. CowManager monitors health, fertility, nutrition, and location, with impressive accuracy.

The Auto Drafting technology removes the need to manually enter the cows requiring special attention. With the user-friendly Auto Drafting application, farmers are fully in control over which cows are drafted through alert filters and time schedules. Its integration with Protrack makes it possible to draft cows to multiple directions i.e. cows with a health alert are automatically draft left and cows with a fertility alert, to the right. This gives farmers the opportunity to work, breed and treat cows more precisely. It saves time, costs and can result in lower empty rates and improved general health of the herd.

“Now with the integration, if the cows are on the platform or on the yard and they transition into the green, into their full heat then they get drafted straight away which is definitely a bit of stress relief as well” explains James Dallinger, owner of Taane Farms in Cambridge.

Auto Drafting Integration

CowManager created the Auto Drafting integration with Protrack after huge demand from farmers. “A manual interface with LIC’s herd management system MINDA was already created and data could easily be manually imported into CowManager. This new draft integration allows farmers to fully focus on the cows that require extra attention and prevents data entry mistakes” says Koen van Meurs, Head of R&D at CowManager.

Frequently Asked Questions

We also provide all ins and outs about all our modules. How to use and understand Fertility Insights, how to read the behavior graph of the Health Module and how amendments appear after ration changes in the Nutrition Module. All answers are explained in just a few steps, easy and simple.

A Frequently Asked Questions section is also displayed in our Knowledge Base. And of course you can easily search this section, allowing you to find an answer to your specific question fast.

Are you curious? Check out the CowManager Knowledge Base.

The smart cow locator is the latest addition to the smart cow monitoring solution of CowManager. The tool is fully integrated with CowManager’s other unique modules Fertility, Health and Nutrition. This combination makes it easy to find cows in heat and intervene fast after receiving health alerts.

Saving labor and costs

During the entire production, CowManager kept its focus on the company’s vision to develop smart and easy to understand solutions to make producers’ lives easier, saving labor and costs. Find my Cow comes with a user-friendly cow locator device, which enables producers to find cows in the barn and outside on pasture quickly. The installation is very easy, no need for extra beacons or calibrations and the module is backwards compatible to all CowManager’s operational systems.

When using the CowManager web application or mobile app, users can select the cow number(s) they want to find. The ear sensor will receive a signal that they have to present themselves to the cow locator. The locator can find cows up to 300-meter free line of sight. When walking into the barn or pasture, you will be guided via the easy to understand 7-colored user interface. Red means that you are far away from the cow and the greener it gets, the closer you are. It also shows which employee found which cow at what time. The daily worklists available on the locator are easy to use.

Benefits of Find my Cow

• Ease of use – simplicity of system and installation
• Saving time – labor and costs in daily routines
• Accuracy in finding cows
• Full integration with CowManager
• Available for herds from 10 to 10,000+ cows
• Works inside the barn and outside on pasture

Highlights from our test panel

Katie Falk, Southern Ridge Cow Palace, United States: “CowManager made my life unreal. Find my Cow is very easy to use. It made things so efficient to find out where your cow is instead of walking back and forth and looking at all your cow numbers. You hold it in your hand and it literally lights up. It helps saving labor and time and my employees love it!”

Sander Penterman from Dutch Dairy LLC also piloted the tool. He believes this will help him and his employees spend less time looking for cows that need to be bred, treated or given special attention. “I’ll be able to walk by and find cows just standing in front of the feedline”, he says.

Dimitry Gruppen from Dittmannsdorfer Milch in Germany has also tested the extra functionality during its pilot phase. He says: “My experience is that it really saves me time I can now spend somewhere else at the farm. Find my Cow makes CowManager complete.”

A New Smart Algorithm

With the average herd size increasing, producers are facing more and more challenges in detecting cows in heat and finding sick cows. Accurate information about cow health is essential to success in dairy farming. CowManager monitors the cows’ condition with great precision, to enable producers to give their cows the attention they need.

To be able to provide producers with the most accurate information about a cow’s fertility status, CowManager has created a smart algorithm, which continuously combines fertility data from CowManager and various management systems that are available worldwide. The data from CowManager’s ear sensors are combined with cow events and alert intervals into a new set of alerts.

Tool for reproduction management

The data is synced continuously and can be configured specifically for every business. Combining cow data gives clear answers about the fertility status of a cow; is she cycling or cystic? What is her heat interval? Was the insemination successful? Is she still pregnant or has she aborted? Is her uterus clean after calving? All this data can be downloaded in reports, which are easy to use for reproductive management and vet checks. A quick overview of all cow data enables producers to make faster and more balanced decisions. It will support producers in selecting for insemination, minimize pregnancy checks and stress, and save management time.

The combination of heat detection with Fertility Insights provides producers a total overview of their herd’s repro status. For example, the 14% fertility issues are being picked up and based on a couple of Fertility Insight statuses. It shows that CowManager basically detects every cow’s fertility status; even when a cow is not coming in heat or when she aborted.

Monitoring Fertility

Koen van Meurs, Head of Research & Development at CowManager, explains: “CowManager is continuously developing ways to improve the system so farmers can make better business decisions. We listen to the wishes of the modern producers who need innovative solutions and insights to overcome the challenges they face. In our 8-weeks update cycle we deploy as many requests as possible. Fertility Insights has been available since our last global update in June. Customers already using the Fertility Module now also have access to Fertility Insights. With Fertility Insights CowManager supports producers in a very practical way, day by day.”

About CowManager

CowManager develops and produces innovative cow-monitoring solutions to improve productivity and profitability of the modern dairy farm. Thousands of producers all over the world rely on CowManager’s easy-to-install, user-friendly ear sensor system for an accurate understanding of their cows’ fertility, health and nutrition status. CowManager has revolutionized the world of cow management systems with groundbreaking innovations and has invented the active ear tag technology, based on generations of knowledge, science and the drive to improve every day. CowManager is available all over the world, distributed and supported by a growing number of dealers. Read more about CowManager’s history.