Santiam Dairy: “I can’t believe how wonderful and easy it is”

Increased preg rates

Santiam Dairy in Turner, Oregon, is home to 500 milking cows. The dairy is owned by Chris DeVries and managed by son-in-law Drew Johnson. After only 7 months of using the CowManager system they already booked great results.

 “I can’t believe how wonderful and easy it is working with these ear tags. Going through our records, I noticed that our pregnancy rates went up, our death loss down and it saves us a couple of hours of working a day.”

Revolutionary ear tags

The CowManager ear tags monitor the activity, rumination and ear temperature of each cow. This accurate information about a cow’s performance is essential to success in dairy farming. The better you know how your animals feel, the better equipped you are to take the right action at the right time. Adequate intervention will result in higher pregnancy rates, improved lactation, a better health status, and fewer cow losses. CowManager’s revolutionary ear tag provides this information for each individual cow, and fully supports the needs of the dairyman. Resulting in a better performance and a lower work-load.

Before using CowManager, the results of the breeding program were just fine, according to Drew Johnson. However, to maintain the pregnancy rates they needed to use lots of medication. Checking on all the heifers used to be very time-consuming and being short on one man on the team didn’t help our ‘spare-time’ at all. Since they monitor heat detection with CowManager, things have been better.

“In terms of saving time, we used to spend two hours every day chalking tails, watching for heats, and checking fresh cows, but we don’t do that anymore and we’re having better results.”

Save on medical costs

The CowManager system combines data from the ear tag with a special algorithm, that gives the dairyman accurate health alerts. These health alerts make sure that you can catch an ill cow early. Early detection of the sickness is key for adequate treatment with less and/or cheaper medication. And it can even prevent the milk-production from dropping. According to Drew Johnson, the health alerts from CowManager saved him $8.000 only in medical costs.

“It also saved us time finding and treating cows that are truly sick. You wouldn’t believe how soon the tags pick up illness. Now we save time and $8.000 because we’re only treating cows that need it, and not treating those that don’t.”

“I can’t say enough good about the system! These little tags have really changed the way we do business!”