Dick Laan: “Working with CowManager is simple”

Dick and Hetty Laan give their young stock a sensor at 13,5 months which remains in their ears. At 14 months, they start breeding the heifers. At the moment, they have 250 sensors in use.

Monitoring fertility

The most important aspect of the system for Dick and Hetty Laan is the Fertility Module. “It is nice to have an extra eye on our farm, because of the company size and the amount of work on the field. It’s a practical tool. The results have strongly improved after we started using CowManager. We noticed that some cows are only in heat during the night, we wouldn’t be able to see those without CowManager.”

Catching disease early

The dairy farmers are also very pleased with the Health Module. “It is striking that CowManager indicates cows with health issues so fast. Due to the Health Module we can also see an increase in activity half a day before calving.” Beside the activity before calving the they can react faster at sick alerts: “Once we had a sick alert with a temperature notification of a lame cow. Nothing was wrong with this cow during the morning milking, but at the time of the sick alert she was lying in a cubicle fully emaciated. At such a moment it is good to have something pointing that out, so you can act directly.”

Tracking transition

The Nutrition Module is a great practical addition within the CowManager system. “You can see immediately whether the composition of the ration is good or not. This makes it possible to detect deviations in the ration very quickly, because the system shows the feed-factor of the whole herd. It’s nice that we instantly get a notification from cows who don’t eat and/or ruminate enough. Our daily routine using the system is actually mainly just looking on the CowManager phone app during the breaks.”