For the first time in three years we are experiencing winter in Wisconsin.
After finishing our weekly fifty-minute herd program, Jose and I can be found standing in the office, waiting for the feeling to return to our hands and “working” the fresh pen. A task that would have required us to trudge back out into the freezing barn for another 30 minutes three years ago has now become a much more comfortable endeavor. All thanks to a small technology investment.
Pointing at the screen my herd owner Mark tells me he’s been watching #5670 because her rumination is all over the map the last three days.
He quickly apologizes to me and asks if we would go out and take a look at her.
“She’s in pen five, stall number three, on the west side, Mark says. Let’s bring her up and have the doc see what’s going on.
“This is the “modern fresh pen workup.” Gone are the days of locking up the fresh pen every day for an hour so we can take the temperature of every fresh cow, test them all for ketosis and sleeve them to check for metritis.
Replacing this time-consuming process is a simple ear tag. This smart technology is just one example of an evolving tool set that is present on more and more dairy farms.
Today’s “smart” dairies look to leverage tools like activity monitors, feed watch programs, parlor AI, and beyond for improved efficiency.
All meant to help the modern dairyman save time, and in this case his fingertips.
Time is a valuable commodity for a dairy’s cows, herdsman, and owners; one might argue the most valuable. Yet, despite the fact that our society largely lives by the phase, “Time is money” we rarely audit its usage.
Such a simple self-awareness exercise for our herdsmen and owners can create more mindful and intentional decisions about where time is lost each day.
Much like a budget our time has fixed and discretionary expenses. On the farm things like paying bills, ordering feed, working a fresh pen, and maintaining equipment often become “fixed” time expenses. Opposingly, things we would call “interesting” or “fun” like planning the next growth phase of the dairy or going to a meeting to learn the latest in fertilizer application, technologies become discretionary time expenses. Secondary thoughts that only gain attention if there is time left over.
I encourage my dairy herdsmen and owners to regularly audit where their time is spent in the same way they would their books.
This can be done through phone applications like aTimeLogger. It allows you to create custom categories that you can toggle on and off as you move in or out of an area.
Or if you prefer analog; simply write down what you’re doing at the top of every hour in using a pen and paper pocket notebook.
Do these tasks for 5-7 days and share them with your management team.
When we review these reports our teams can be more conscious of where and what their time is being spent on throughout the workday. Making them mindful of where they could plug in new technology to save them time.
Smart dairy technologies help improve the efficiency of fixed tasks, giving key decision makers more time to complete discretionary tasks. Which frees up time in the day to do the things they enjoy as well. And in our case, helping them to simply be able to feel their fingers at the end of the day!
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