Ensuring that animal health issues are dealt with effectively and that the labour involved in the treatment is efficient is very important, particularly as herd sizes become larger. Farms with an automatic milking system have an extra tool they can use to increase the effectiveness of the treatment, thereby decrease the effort of the farmer has to make to achieve the best results.
Management, T4C & InHerd, Cow health, Tips & Tricks
Ensuring that animal health issues are dealt with effectively and that the labour involved in the treatment is efficient is very important, particularly as herd sizes become larger. Farms with an automatic milking system have an extra tool they can use to increase the effectiveness of the treatment, thereby decrease the effort of the farmer has to make to achieve the best results.
Multiple programs in the market can log medicine on your farm. Many farmers use the same program that they are used to from the milking parlour. However, when using a Lely Astronaut, the T4C software actually has treatment plans embedded in the software, which offers you a number of advantages compared to other medicine logging systems.
Why do we encourage farmers to use treatment plans in T4C instead of other medicine logging programs? Well, the answer already lies in the difference in the name: medicine logging programs only register the use of medicines, whereas a complete treatment plan offers much more. It is an actionable protocol describing the treatment or action steps in order to cure or prevent a specific disease in an effective way. Assigning a treatment plan to a cow logs any medicine(s) used, generates automatic tasks for the Astronaut (such as milk separation or a hot rinse after milking a treated cow) and sends automatic reminders when the next action needs to be done. Examples of such actions might be applying the next treatment, carrying out a physical check-up or putting the cow on report after a certain amount of days or hours. This is relevant, for example, when a cow receives a hormone treatment and needs to be on the heat and insemination list after a specific time.
To ensure the effective and safe use of the treatment plans, they should always be set in agreement with a vet.
Additionally, good logging of disease treatment with the help of treatment plans offers you farm-specific insights into herd health. Reports are available on disease incidence per disease category and on medicine usage. These reports help you and the farmer to analyse herd health and identify ways to improve overall herd health. Moreover, proper disease logging will give you even more benefits in the future, like introduced on the Lely Future Farm Days with Lely Horizon!
In summary: setting treatment plans according to the farmers’ needs and requirements helps in dealing with animal health-related issues effectively and safely by:
• Performing treatment steps at the right time
o Through the farm specific treatment plans, including follow-up actions based on your needs
o Sending an automatic reminder when a follow-up treatment or action is needed
o Adding a cow to a report after a set amount of time
• Logging medicine usage
• Automatic milk separation for a set period of time
o Prevention of antibiotics in the tank
o Prevention of unnecessary long milk separation since it is linked to the medicine (this is an advantage compared to manual milk separation)
• Option to do a hot rinse after a milking a cow after an intramammary antibiotic treatment
o Health treatment tasks of today are visible in ‘Report 14 – Health treatment tasks’.
• Logging treatment, which helps in creating insight into disease prevalence in the herd and medicine usage
o Report 63 – Analyse – Health treatments
o Health overview – Medicine usage
o More insights are on their way – stay tuned at the LFFD!
