24/04/2022

Currently we have 40% of eligible customers migrated onto Horizon and using some of the new features Horizon has to offer. Horizon has taken the sensory information that is collected throughout the day and is now delivering the information in a more intuitive way for the farmers to help make management decisions with his cows, examples being a reduction in failures, keep open advice, early detection of ketosis cases. Plus many other great new features the program has to offer like the App.

One of the great new features ‘Cow Index’ is explained below- 
Comparing cows to each other is always challenging, as there are many factors to consider. The cow index is designed to help with this. You can find the cow index on the cowcard in the cow rank widget on the overview page. For an overview of all the cows on the reproduction prediction widget on the dashboard, click here on ‘Go to herd overview’ and then select the Cow index tab. This page shows the cow index for all the cows and lets you apply sorting to find the cows that you are looking for.

The average cow index score is 100; cows that are better than the average cows will score higher than 100 and underperforming cows will score below 100. The greater the difference to 100, the better or worse that the cow is.

The cow index is a combination of four 4 indices:

• production
• health
• reproduction and
• robot efficiency

As the cow index is calculated based on a number of other indices, it gives more insight than when focusing purely on milk production. It also provides the opportunity to drill down further into these indices. As a result, the cow index is used as the basis for many cow-related decisions on the farm such as breeding and keeping decisions.

What are these indices based on?

The indices are updated whenever new parameters are found to make the index more accurate. What the indices are currently based on can be found below:
Production

• Expected future milk production

Health

• Curative health treatment
• Sick chance
• Somatic cell count

Reproduction

• Inseminations

Robot efficiency

• Milk yield per boxtime
• Robot visiting behaviour

Please contact Sam or Izzy for more information on Horizon and don’t forget, anyone enrolled onto their free trial before 30th April 2022 is automatically put into a prize draw to win a £100 voucher to spend on merchandise or consumables.