Watch: technology to take the strain of heat detection

After many years of experience, if there is one thing I think I’m good at it would have to be detecting when a cow or heifer is in heat.

I have been using artificial insemination (AI) on my cows and heifers for the last 19 years, and I have never found it very difficult to detect heats. I’m sure that I missed some animals cycling, but not many.

Calving in tight batches has helped because it means there is a lot of heat activity around the one time. I have tried using patches, but they didn’t make life any easier.

I have never used a teaser bull or bullock, so have been completely reliant on observation. But there is one major drawback – it takes, roughly, an hour per batch, per day.

This was fine when I only had one or two batches to watch, but this year I have two batches of heifers and two batches of cows. So this is potentially four hours per day, or 28 hours per week, just watching for heats.

If you add in the time spent bringing animals into the yard, I’m not going to have much time left to do anything else.

Options

With all this running around, in my head I have been considering my options. Firstly, I decided to try a teaser bull. But what good would just one be? I needed two.

I had two suitable bulls in the fattening pen. They wouldn’t settle and kept mounting all the other cattle in the pen.

I thought this technology was just for dairy farmers, so was surprised when I discovered that it was suitable for my situation

I got the job done and was all set to put chin balls on them.

Then I started to make a few enquiries about some alternatives. I had heard about collars and tags, but I didn’t think that there was anything suitable for suckler farmers.

I thought this technology was just for dairy farmers, so was surprised when I discovered that it was suitable for my situation.

I did some quick sums. If I could save two hours a day at £10/hour (approx. €11.61), which isn’t massive pay, this would be £140/week (approx. €162.48). That was it, I had talked myself into it. I have got myself two MooCall Heat collars for the teasers, and tags for the cows and heifers.

Activity

The way the system works is by measuring activity. It monitors the proximity of the teaser to the other animal and the interaction between the two.

The last piece of the puzzle is for the cow to stand to be mounted by the teaser (or bull). At this stage you get a text to your mobile phone.

If it works, it will prove to be a tremendous asset to a lot of farmers (myself included).

At times I have had to stand in the field for over half an hour to prove the system is correctly identifying heats

While I am not starting to breed my cows and heifers for a few weeks yet, I wanted to start the system early so that I could check how accurate it is.

I have it in place for the last few weeks, and it looks to be spot-on in detecting heats. I am like a child with a new toy. Every time I get a text to say that an animal is in heat, I’m straight out to the field to check.

At times I have had to stand in the field for over half an hour to prove the system is correctly identifying heats.

I will give regular updates on progress, or problems, throughout the season. However, so far, so good.

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