Dr. Jason Nickell, DVM, PhD, DACVPM, Director of Insights and Outcomes for Merck Animal Health talks to Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster Ron Hays about how SenseHub® Cow Calf and SenseHub® Feedlot monitoring provide data and insights to help advance beef cattle health and productivity.
“At a high level, the SenseHub® platform provides individual animal monitoring, both at the cow-calf level and at the feedlot,” Dr. Nickell described.
The animals are monitored through technologically advanced ear tags programmed to capture different forms of information from the animal wearing it to improve the producer’s decision-making capabilities. At the cow-calf level, data is focused on estrus detection for artificial insemination and embryo transfer-based operations. The SenseHub® Feedlot technology hones in on early disease detection.
“On the cow-calf level, we are always trying to optimize our labor resources while maximizing our reproductive capabilities,” Dr. Nickell noted. “On the feedlot side, we are working with animals that don’t like to convey that they are ill. The system has been shown to communicate illness earlier in the disease phase with more accuracy than a human, which leads to improved treatment outcomes.”
Many factors about an operation determine if a SenseHub® platform will be conducive to a producer’s needs including lines of sight, availability of cellular communication, and current computer setup.
“We are also going to be talking a lot with your employee base to manage their expectations and get them educated,” Dr. Nickell added. “That continues even after installation and the system is in use because this is relatively new. We really try to hold their hands through that adoption phase.”
While the dairy industry has utilized similar techniques from an animal health perspective for several years and has a very developed SenseHub® technology in place.
“We see a lot of good things happening on the dairy side, so we are taking a page out of that playbook,” Nickell shared. “If we were to expand beyond that, the row crop industry has utilized similar techniques for several decades, now. It would be very unlikely to walk onto a row crop production system and not have some sort of precision ag technology at work.”
Dr. Nickell expressed that the progress on the SenseHub® platform as yet another example of Merck Animal Health’s commitment to the beef industry in addition to their continuing development of biopharmaceuticals.
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