Imagine having the ability to monitor your cows, wherever they are and wherever you are, so you can make timely decisions about health, breeding, feed management and grazing – all from your smart phone or the convenience of your office.

Today that is possible, and affordable, with SenseHub Beef, a new electronic animal monitoring solution from Allflex Livestock Intelligence.

SenseHub Beef delivers actionable information on health and wellbeing of individual cows and groups. It is very useful in detecting heats, so artificial insemination can be timed for improved conception rates.

The system will also see if that cow or heifer comes back into heat. For instance, you could rebreed a second-calf heifer if the first-cycle AI did not take or see that an embryo transfer failed in a recip. Even a small increase in conception rates generates a positive return on investment.

Producers using advanced reproductive technology in their breeding herds get a highly accurate breeding window and a measure of estrus intensity to improve heat detection and timing for breeding through AI or natural service.

The system also measures activities that are associated with wellbeing, such as rumination, feeding and motion. If these are out of the normal pattern, SenseHub Beef sends you a report to look for a certain animal that may be in distress, is seriously off feed or is having calving or other health difficulties. You can respond in a timely fashion, potentially reducing costs from death loss, animal health inputs or digestive upset.

How SenseHub Beef works

A high-tech ear tag monitors movement and sends data to a system antenna, which can cover 40 acres. The data readers are often placed near water or feed sources, but several antennas can be linked up to cover larger areas. Tags have a three-year life and can be transferred to different animals.

Actionable data is available roughly 10 days after applying the tag. SenseHub Beef gathers real-time information on rumination, eating, activity and other parameters and reports it every 20 minutes. The system uses market-proven algorithms to analyze each animal. The reports are delivered as trend data and on a dashboard to-do list in near real-time.

More calves and increased peace of mind

SenseHub Beef empowers you to significantly improve reproductive and health management, increasing the number of calves produced and taking advantage of better intelligence on your herd.

Precise cycling information, including highly accurate heat detection, detection of anestrus cows, and cows suspected for abortion, makes breeding more cost-effective and uses labor more effectively. AI users benefit from precise timing while in natural-breeding herds, knowing the date of last heat, as recorded in the system, helps to predict the calving date and provides other timely information.

Accurate health reports provide actionable insight on each cow for proactive health management. This is pertinent to wellbeing of the cows during the breeding, calving and weaning phases, in feed management during winter and catching cases of foot rot, pink eye and summer pneumonia during the grazing season. With many health challenges, rumination and eating are among the first things to change when other symptoms may not yet be visible.

SenseHub Beef delivers peace of mind so you can step away from the operation and perform other activities, knowing that you will be alerted if there is an issue. Monitoring helps you schedule labor more efficiently as well. If hired help is not feeding animals on time, that pattern will quickly be evident on SenseHub and can be corrected before lasting harm occurs. For couples that own another business or have jobs in town, or kids who are showing animals or playing sports, they can stay on top of their cow herd status while doing other things.

Having more precise information on health and breeding status allows producers to handle animals more efficiently. A team can get SenseHub reports, so your hired hand, spouse or family member each can see the same data. And, over time, SenseHub Beef gives you a feel for subtle things that are happening in your herd, so that you can make changes that help you attain your goals.

How do I get started?

Contact Allflex Livestock Intelligence at 800-989-8247 or by visiting www.allflex.global/us. You also can learn more at www.Sensehubbeef.com.