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, farmers 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 behavioural development of each calf, allowing farmers 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 behavioural 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 maximise 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.

We’ve Got You Sorted

After receiving alerts from CowManager ear sensors, Sort my Cow allows farmers to automatically or manually via the app divert cows that need attention, all while maintaining smooth cow flow and minimising 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 a Gate

“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 labour needs, increase efficiency, shorten lock-up times, and improve cow welfare and profits,” says Gerard Griffioen, founder of CowManager.

“With Sort my Cow, farmers 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 farmers stay one step ahead.”

Sort my Cow is crafted from premium US-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.

CowManager Drafting Gate

There’s also a CowManager drafting gate available, made in and for New Zealand. Check out Draft 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 personalised 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 customised 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 Research & Development 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 behaviour and temperature data we collected from millions of cows worldwide.”

Global customer panel

The Transition & Nutrition Module was designed with the help of dairy farmers 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 17 kg for our close-up cows. This has already contributed strongly to healthier fresh cows and higher peak milk production.”

Work preventively

The transition period is the primary risk period where 75% of all adult cow disease events occur. In the past farmers 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 behaviour 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.

Optimise 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 farmer 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 farmers with the tools to take feed and transition management to the next level. More control and full insights help farmers 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 coloured hourly behaviour graphs on your smartphone or desktop computer. CowManager monitors health, fertility, nutrition, transition 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. For example; cows with a health alert are automatically drafted left and cows with a fertility alert, go 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”, James Dallinger, owner of Taane Farms in Cambridge, explains.

Auto Drafting Integration

CowManager created the Auto Drafting integration with Protrack after huge demand from farmers.

Koen van Meurs, Head of Research & Development at CowManager: “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.”

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 behaviour 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. This combination makes it easy to find cows in heat and intervene fast after receiving health alerts.

Saving labour 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 farmers’ lives easier, saving labour and costs. Find my Cow comes with a user-friendly cow locator device, which enables farmers to find cows in the shed 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 shed or pasture, you will be guided via the easy to understand 7-coloured 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.

Test Panel Highlights

Katie Falk from Southern Ridge Cow Palace in 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 labour and time and my employees love it!”

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, farmers 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 farmers to give their cows the attention they need.

To be able to provide farmers 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 farmers to make faster and more balanced decisions. It will support farmers in selecting for insemination, minimise pregnancy checks and stress, and save management time.

The combination of heat detection with Fertility Insights provides farmers 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 farmers who need innovative solutions and insights to overcome the challenges they face.”

He continues: “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 farmers 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 farmers 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 revolutionised 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.

CowManager’s Fertility Module

CowManager gives a historical and real-time overview of accurate data. Want to improve your pregnancy rates? Fertility Insights is part of the Fertility Module. We’re sure our Fertility Module helps you with that. Know exactly when a cow is in heat and when to inseminate.