Vet Plus veterinarian Kyle Kannan has been working with Paul and Sarah Koopal for years. The Koopals are third generation farmers in Rerewhakaaitu, Central Plateau, and won the CowManager system in NZDIA’s Shared Farmer of the Year category in 2024.
Ever since then, Paul and Kyle have been exploring and utilising all the data from the CowManager system together, to take the already high performing farm to the next level.
With CowManager ear sensors, they track the herd’s ear temperature, rumination and eating time, activity and behaviour. According to Paul, it’s been a life changer for animal health.
He says: “It’s a real simple app on my phone, on my desktop in the cow shed, or at home. I have alerts come through, like health alerts for sick cows or suspicious cows. You’re picking up something that’s wrong with the cow a lot earlier than you would without the tech. We can intervene a lot earlier.”
It allows the Koopals to reduce the use of antibiotics, which they consider a huge plus.
Paul: “Because we’re picking up sick animals before they’re actually sick, before they know they’re sick, you can make calls on what you’re treating them with. Sometimes it’s just a case of giving them an anti-inflammatory and then they’re back to normal within a day. Whereas if you didn’t have that tech and you didn’t know she was sick until she was sick, you might need to use more antibiotics.”
Animal health isn’t the only benefit of using the CowManager system. According to Vet Plus vet Kyle Kannan, it’s just scratching the surface.
He says: “There’s also a ton of animal health related to nutrition. Like, how well we feed cows. That has a massive impact on the health of a herd, the health of an individual animal. That information is all coming through as well. And then on top of that, there’s fertility. Which is a key driver of profitability and an integral part of the farm business.”
Paul agrees and shares how the high-tech cow tags have helped him during mating.
“In the cow shed it saves us a lot of time and a lot of labour. Our milkings during mating have become a lot quicker because we’re not having to check tail paint, we’re not having to jump up and check every single cow that comes through.
Because we’re doing AI all the way through our mating, we can use a lot more of the short gestation semen on our herd. The cows that have been given that semen are calving 12 to 13 days earlier, so that’s more days in milk for us on farm. We’re able to actually have more cows in calf as well.”
“And”, he adds, “Because we’ve got CowManager picking up cows that are on heat, we don’t use bulls anymore on farm. That’s been quite a health and safety benefit.”
Kyle emphasises that cow tag technology isn’t just valuable for farmers – it’s a high-tech treasure chest for vets, too.
“We’re getting information that we’ve never been able to directly measure. You can’t see if your cows are full, or how much they’ve eaten. They look reasonably content, but now we’re getting live data pieces that say, ‘that cow is definitely content’, at a herd level. Now we can jump into our phone and onto our computer screen and actually put some solid information around that.”
Kyle continues: “As vets, we see the more retrospective data that comes through. There was a large scale of information that we just didn’t know, and we weren’t able to collect. An example of that would be between calving and mating.
So, as soon as a cow calves, how fast is she having her first heat? Obviously, we don’t whip tail paint on immediately as soon as they calf, so we don’t know and we don’t measure that as a thing.
Veterinarian Kyle Kannan (left) and dairy farmer Paul Koopal (right).
The first year Paul and Sarah got CowManager, we were able to look at that, and they were actually behind target for what we call the days to first heat; how fast the cows recover from calving. We were able to find a data point that we would never have seen before and then make changes to impact that data point. We managed to improve it.“
He concludes: “At our reviews we’re able to look at the data, have a look at all the different things coming out of it. It’s basically a set of whole brand-new metrics that we’re able to use now in New Zealand that we probably never been able to. It’s quite a cool frontier that we’re currently in.”
From a personal side of things, Paul really enjoys the 24/7 aspect of the CowManager cow tags.
“It allows me to get off farm, because I know someone is looking after my cows, through mating, 24/7”, he says.
He elaborates: “I never used to take any time off during mating period and now I’ll literally just come back from a holiday for four days. It’s brilliant, because I know all those cows are still getting their cycling and are still getting picked up by the system.”
Kyle reckons this is just the beginning – as a vet he’s excited about what CowManager will bring to the future of cow monitoring and farm management.
“This isn’t static technology, it’s bloody on the roll. It’s going to be really cool to see what’s coming in the next couple of years. The Milk Sensor is another thing CowManager are rolling in real soon and that’s basically going to close the loop. All the repro stuff that we’re doing is fantastic, but at the end of the day, milk is the product that we want.”