Who’s in heat?

As dairy farmers, I’m certain we’ve all wished for an extra set of hands more times than we can count. Four years ago, we were looking for an extra set of hands but decided to invest in an extra set of eyes instead.

Cow Manager now gives us the extra set of eyes we need for catching heifers in heat. Our heifer yard is situated in a way that makes it difficult for us to watch heifers throughout the day. Before installing an activity monitoring system, we weren’t catching heats and getting heifers bred as early as we wanted to.

We’ve since expanded to using Cow Manager in the milking herd as well. We’re with the cows so much that we often observe heats before Cow Manager alerts us, but there are still cows that Cow Manager catches before we do — especially this summer. Cow Manager caught a lot of heats we never saw. After checking their activity charts, it was pretty clear why: activity was up from 3-4 a.m., and that was it for those estrus cycles.

Cow Manager has become such an integral part of our herd management that it’s easy to think of it as just part of the routine. However, we had a bit of a Cow Manager mishap last week that was anything but routine.

Last Thursday, we culled a group of cows. One of the cows, Gummy, had a Cow Manager tag in. Glen removed the tag when he took Gummy’s neck chain off. He set the tag on the counter in the milk house, planning to delink the sensor and put it in the tag box in the office later.

On Friday, we brought a group of heifers home from the neighbors and put them in our heifer breeding pen. Before they moved in, they each got a Cow Manager tag.

That night, Glen found me while I was feeding calves and said, “Well, we have a bit of a problem.”

“Oh?” I asked.

“Cow Manager says that Gummy is in heat,” he explained.

“Are you sure?” I asked, as I pressed my fingers into my eyes, dreading where this was going.

He pulled up the Cow Manager app, and we cross-checked the ID numbers with our Dairy Comp app. Sure enough, the ID marked as “In heat” was Gummy’s number. Her activity chart showed an increase in activity and a decrease in rumination. Our immediate assumption was that Gummy’s tag didn’t properly delink and re-link before Glen put it in one of the heifers, and we had no idea which heifer was now wearing Gummy’s tag.

We had a tag linking error once before, and it was a real pain to correct. I stood there, envisioning holding heifers’ ears while trying to read the tiny six-digit sensor number on the back of the tag, right after said tag had just been placed and the heifers’ ears were still healing. With our luck, we’d check all 12 just-tagged heifers and find it in the 12th heifer.

Glen thought we could narrow our search by watching the heifers for a while in the morning and just checking tags on the ones showing signs of heat, since we already knew the heifer was in heat. I agreed that his idea was better than sorting, locking up and checking all of the newly-tagged heifers.

“Ugh,” I sighed. I had a full day of dairy judging practice scheduled for Saturday and prep for World Dairy Expo planned for Sunday.

Then, as Glen slid his phone back into the oversized pocket of his cargo pants, he said, “What’s this?” and pulled out a Cow Manager tag. He found the ID number on the back of the sensor and looked it up in the Cow Manager app. It was Gummy’s tag, praise be to the Cow Manager deities.

We don’t know when Glen put Gummy’s tag in his pocket on his way to the office. If it was before he grabbed all of the tags for the heifers and this tag managed to not end up in a heifer’s ear, then we probably should have bought a lottery ticket. More likely, he grabbed it after he worked heifers and then got pulled away from the office before he had a chance to delink it and put it away.

We do know now that it was Glen whose rumination was down and activity was up. Does Cow Manager count skidloader trips and 4-wheeler rides as activity, or does Glen take more steps in a day than our cows? Can the Cow Manager sensor detect how many times Glen’s stomach rumbles when he gets hungry?

Unanswered questions aside, at least we didn’t have to squeeze in all that extra heifer sorting. Gummy’s tag has been delinked and put away until the next cow or heifer needs it, and we’re still chuckling about Glen being in heat.

Sadie Frericks and her husband, Glen, milk 100 cows near Melrose, Minnesota. They have three children: Dan, Monika, and Daphne. Sadie also writes a blog at www.dairygoodlife.com. She can be reached at sadiefrericks@gmail.com.