DairyVoice Podcast
DairyVoice Podcast
Dairy Producer Steve Harnish on using herd data to support management decisions
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode of DairyVoice, host Connie Kuber of Sealpro Silage Barrier Films talks with Steve Harnish about how herd data fits into the daily workflow on his operation. Steve shares how using Dart, the proven herd management system built on standardized data, helps organize herd information, monitor performance, and support informed decisions across the farm.
The conversation also explores how connected technologies, mobile tools like PocketDairy, and collaboration with local DHIA service affiliates help bring herd data together and keep management aligned across the operation.
To learn more about Dart herd management software from DRMS, visit drms.org
You're listening to Dairy Voice by Dairy Business News, a podcast exclusively for the dairy industry.
SPEAKER_03One of our sponsors of the Dairy Voice Podcast is National DHIA. And DHIA ensures information accuracy and represents their members' interests. They are the direct voice for the dairy information industry. To find out more, go to DHIA.org.
SPEAKER_06This episode is brought to you by Dart from DRMS. In the dairy industry, there are still a few myths about herd management software. But producers using Dart see the reality. Dart is the proven herd management system built on standardized data used in real herds every day, helping producers organize herd data, monitor performance, and support informed decisions across the farm. Dart scales with the operation, supporting herds of any size and the complexity of today's dairies, while connecting herd data across tools like pocket dairy and herd HQ. Dart, there are myths. Producers prove the reality. Watch the producer stories at drms.org.
SPEAKER_04Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening wherever you are in your day. Welcome to the Dairy Voice Podcast by Dairy Business News. I'm your host, Connie Cooper with SteelPro Silage Barrier Films by Connor AgriScience. Thanks for joining us today. And please like, subscribe, and share this podcast with your friends. So dairy farms rely on accurate herd records to guide everyday management decisions from breeding and health protocols to monitoring herd performance over a time span. When herd information is structured and reliable, it becomes a foundation that producers can use to manage cows more effectively and respond quickly when issues arise. In this episode of Dairy Voice, I'm talking with dairy producer Steve Harnish from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, about how herd data fits into his daily workflow of the operation. Steve is going to share on how to use Dart, a proven herd management system built with standardized data, and how it helps organize his herd's information, how he monitors performance, and how it supports decisions across his whole farm. We'll talk about the connected technologies, mobile tools like Pocket Dairy and collaboration with local DHIA service affiliates and how that helps bring herd data together and keep everything aligned across the operation. So welcome, Steve, to the Dairy Boys Podcast.
SPEAKER_01I'm a partner at Central Minor Dairy in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. If you're not from our area, go about an hour and a half west of Philadelphia. Get out of the city, out of the suburbs, and into farmland, and you'll find us there. We are milking 200 cows three times a day. This farm has been in my family. I'm the third generation in ownership now. I grew up on the farm, did chores as a young person, was away at school for a few years, and then came back first as herd manager and then eventually came into ownership through a transition process. Took quite a while, but we have have completed it from the previous generation to the current as of a few years ago.
SPEAKER_00OneTrack is a new choice for progressive dairies looking to simplify feeding practices and elevate performance. Fed at up to 40% of the ration, this high-energy macro ingredient works alongside on-farm ingredients to reduce sourcing, mixing, and batching, freeing up valuable time and resources. For more information, go to OneTrack, that's T-R-A-K Right.com. That's O-N-E-T-R-A-K-R-I-G-H-T dot com.
SPEAKER_04You've got a lot of herd data that you're trying to juggle, right? And what role does that herd data play in how you manage your dairy?
SPEAKER_01So we make decisions every day, right? First thing when you get out of bed, you can choose whether you have breakfast or not, or what flavor of coffee, or whatever it is. Every day, and it maybe to some people it becomes you know second nature and decision making isn't difficult. You go with your gut or whatever. Sure. But when managing a herd of cows, regardless of what size it is, it could be 20, it could be 2,000, it could be 20,000. Managing a herd of cows, you make decisions, and uh hopefully you make smart decisions and the right decisions. You set out goals, go through a little bit of history. When I'm sitting in my farm barn office right now talking with you, when I was a child, when you come in here to play or something, there's a big breeding wheel on the wall. People of a certain generation will know what that looks like. Well, maybe there's there are some in use today, but like it was a very manual put the peg in the wheel, move it around, you know, you know what's supposed to happen. Yeah, that eventually graduated into a paper, columns of paper that slid across every month. You stick a new on the left side and take one off the right side. Now you can see all your past records. And this is before I was in management at all. And it was a system and it worked, and you could eventually come up with the right decision for a cow. We went computerized in 1998, 40 years, 30 years ago. And with this tool that we've been using ever since then, with Dart, you can make a daily decision. You know, issue comes up with a cow. She's in heat. What do I do with her? Is it time to breed her again? Quit now. You can be a long-term analyzed data over the last three or four years, and is a is a choice that we made that long ago, yielding the results that we want. So that that's a big overview of why do we have this system and why do we utilize software is to make better decisions.
SPEAKER_04Sure. What types of this herd information do you rely on most often? Is it mostly breeding?
SPEAKER_01Everything, to be honest. Okay. That we've got a number of protocols that we do the same every week, or every is a weekly protocol or a monthly protocol. I'll give a couple examples that are that are widely different. Hoof trimming. We have a scheduled date when the hoof trim is going to arrive. We need to know which cows go in the trimming table, whether you know there's a concern with a sore foot or whether it's just time for a maintenance trim. And there are cows that we definitely don't want to put on. If she was trimmed two months ago, don't do that. If she just, if she's scheduled to be, if she was just bred two days ago, we don't want a stressful experience for her. That's one decision point for that one chore. Every Monday we move animals into our calving pen. Anyone that's due that week, move those animals. It's a real simple one, but you need a list of animals that are due next. What happens in the middle of summer? It's hot, you're concerned about overcrowding, and the the due date list is bigger than what the pen should accommodate. We should pick and choose which animals we're gonna keep back in the dry cow pen versus bring up. And well, what's the inventory of that pen? Every single little decision that you make, if it's even if it's a routine thing that you do every week, just have a routine set up that I pull up this report on the software, look at the list and make my call there. We do, I mentioned maybe earlier, a big long-term lookbacks of our timed AI protocol. Is it achieving our goals? We did we make a change and want to know what the results are. I think it's it'd be much easier if it was a 20,000 cow herd to make a change, get like 20,000 results from that and then analyze. With a 200 cow herd, it can take a year or two or three to you really know. That's the that's the big picture. Pull the data together. And sometimes you have to slice up data to understand it. Like we we want to take care of our first lactation cows. So let's exclude all of the conception rate data for older ones. Well, let's look at second service. We have a time diet protocol for first service. Let's compare the cows that were in heat and we bred off of standing heat versus the ones that we resynced and see if we should change something there. So your software needs to be able to accommodate, excluding a lot of animals when you're taking a big picture look.
SPEAKER_06This episode is brought to you by DRMS, a trusted provider of dairy information and decision tools. As a nonprofit with deep ties to NC State and Iowa State Universities, we've spent over 65 years serving the dairy industry, delivering research-backed software, standardized data, and exceptional customer support. Our dedicated team works alongside producers and consultants to ensure they get the training, tools, and insights they need. We turn complex herd data into clear, actionable insights that help producers and consultants make informed decisions every day through solutions built in collaboration with the dairy industry. Learn more at drms.org.
SPEAKER_04So when you're looking at these big picture herd performance or say trends over time, how often are you doing that? How does this program help you do that?
SPEAKER_01The easy answer is whenever there's a problem. We've been breeding cows for four months and looking at the weekly results, and those four months it's been declining a little bit. Like, oh, let's fix the problem. I would like to say that I do this routinely and have a schedule of every six months look at it. But there are times and there are situations where it's like, huh, this isn't like let's let's double check how things are going. Best answer is you enjoy looking at the data and your curiosity is such that you look at it more often than you need to. Do her check on Monday morning, enter all the stuff in and say, all right, let's look at our yearly preg rate and see how it's doing this month. You're so excited. If the software is easy enough to use and it comes naturally and it satisfies that curiosity, you can look at it much more often than you need to. Might not be helpful, but at least scratches that itch.
SPEAKER_04And do you use this information for production at, you know, like grouping cows for milking groups and that kind of thing as well?
SPEAKER_01So we I'll give an example. Our we most of our cows are in a free in a freestyle barn with okay, two separate two separate groups, and we we like to separate by lactation. So the first lactation animals are with each other, social, you know, hierarchy, pecking order avoidance, older ones than the other, but we also have a compost bedded pack barn. We did our herd expansion, build a new milking parlor, need more housing, and like, hey, maybe our herd could benefit from it's a little more expensive to keep it bedded, but it's it's a little better environment for the cows that need an easier time with things, you know, um big cows, old cows, a lane foot, a cow that likes to lane stalls backwards. You know, this is a place to throw those animals. And there's always a reason why you put the animal in that pen, and we record it in the software. So to say she got moved here because she had a sore hawk. The date we moved her was March 1st. So when you regularly, monthly, I'll just print off a report of everyone in that compost bed pack barn. Why is she here? How long has she been here? And what are any health codes associated with her? Let the cows walk past you, come out of the parlor, look at number 123, and she had a sore hawk two months ago. It is flawless right now. The hair regrew and everything. If we want to, we could put her back in the barn in the freestalls again. It's an example of how I group cows or move them around based on those records. If they weren't there, I don't know exactly why I put her in the pen. Does she have utter edema after she calves? And maybe this will be more comfortable for a week or two. So that's just an example of if you as much as you record, there's there's probably a use for for utilizing that data later on at some point.
SPEAKER_04Your SteelPro silage barrier film today. Protect the seed, fertilizer, labor, and expensive inputs that you've invested in. Choose best in class SteelPro now in three different versions. Traditional two-roll application, our new co-rolled application, and super simple and wildly successful one-layer film, SteelPro 1. It's easy to buy, easy to use, contractor coverage, and replicate. Learn more at SteelProSilage.com. That's S-E-A-L-C-R-O Silage.com. Family owned and operated for over 25 years. 559-779-5961. That's 559-779-5961. You've used Dart, the system, for many years. What led you to start using it and how did you hear about it?
SPEAKER_01So I was a high school student when my dad, who was uh owner and manager of the herd, decided to go with Dart. I actually had no say in the matter, other than I was curious that a PC showed up in the barn office. Um we have one in the house. Obviously, this is the 90s, dial up internet, familiar with email, but he had been using the wall chart and everything before. He had a natural curiosity about computers, was an early user, early adopter, guided to spreadsheets. And I think it was just the desire to like he saw the advantages of digital records. We had been owner samplers with our DHIA, a local DHIA affiliate. And when they chose to be a part of DRMS and have that organization handle their records, they started offering Dart. This would have been 1994. And so he was one of the earlier adopters there. I was away at school and came back and started managing the herd. And we were still back in the DOS interface days with the blue screen and white letters and very little mouse movement, lots of keyboard shortcuts. He he did the same thing that I do now of just weekly protocols of which cows should I enroll in in time day, who's open. Like there's there's a philosophy that I use taken from an education term. It was no child left behind, I have no cow left behind. I don't want an open cow that hasn't been bred to just get lost in a shuffle and be out there.
SPEAKER_05Sure.
SPEAKER_01We can run a simple report called All Open Animals and see if she's enrolled in a time. It's it's my double check just to make sure that we didn't forget about somebody or no one slips through the cracks. The initial, the initial you know you'd have to ask him what the initial attraction was. I think it was a lot of curiosity, but for me as a user, I glommed right onto it when I was asked to come back or invited to come back and manage the herd. Right. One of the philosophies is don't make a thousand changes at once with a herd this size, do one thing at a time, see what the results are, and having records as I made individual changes, whether it's reproductive protocols or anything else, having good accurate records and then looking back after a time to analyze what the results were, allowed us just to keep iterating over the years.
SPEAKER_04So over those years, are there ways that you've changed how you use reports at all?
SPEAKER_01It it ended up being just tweak after tweak after tweak of the years. So, like we initially had a vaccination protocol for we use a nine-way modified live vaccine on all of our cows after they calve. And the original protocol we had was 14 days after calving. We set up the reports in Dart to say generate a list of every, you know, we're gonna do this once a month, every cow from 14 to whatever. And we actually had a few health issues with early lactation cows that mounted an immune response to that vaccine, got a fever and went off feed. And like, you know what? That doesn't have to be there. We can move that vaccine protocol and give them a few more weeks, and it's still we'll still get the shot delivered in time, but well before she's bred. So made it just an adjustment based on results that we saw. So that's a really small example. Obviously, the big one that a lot of people put a lot of thought and energy into is artificial insemination and whether to wait for natural heats and what's the best voluntary waiting period. Like there's there's a thousand options of how to do it, and probably no two farms are the same. But it's something everyone who uses utilizes artificial insemination is thinking and and analyzing all the time. The right data, and especially I'll say, with the help of consultants that want to help you out that are familiar with how your data is organized, they can visit 100 farms, and as long as you're using one of the more common systems, if they have you know 10, 20 dark customers, they can go from farm to farm, run the same reports and say, you know what, here's something you overlooked. A consultant told me, somebody trying to sell me something, but also a good, a good cow person, looked at my records and said and pointed out to me, your dry period in first lactation cows is a little shorter than what I think is industry standard or recommendation now. Look at the production hit just your second lactation animals have compared to what we expect from your first, third, fourth, fifth. Why why is two, why is their number just consistently lower than what it should be? I followed that advice, made the change, the dry period length, lengthened it by a week, and was able to look back after a couple of years and say, Yep, I that confirmed it. There was we filled a hole in the productivity of the herd.
SPEAKER_04So what features or tools do you would you say that you use most often then?
SPEAKER_01Most often is just a I shouldn't say a standardized report. They have standardized reports just to get you started.
SPEAKER_05Sure.
SPEAKER_01That are cross the same for everyone, but the user reports you can add or remove data fields or set constraints to do whatever you need to do. But report number one in my software is all pregnant animals, arranged by the cow that's due next, all the way down to the cow that was just bred and we don't confirm pregnant, which helps me see how many are in the calving pen, who should get dried up this week, who should get moved from one pen to another. Like it's it's it's almost the daily report to glance at every day. So just generating those reports, I would say number two is protocols. So if you have a protocol for hoof trimming, if you have a protocol for artificial insemination, protocols for vaccines, they enroll the cows and it they automatically get dropped into the reports on the on the correct day. For a look back over a long amount of time, or even just a monthly look back, they call them trackers, activity tracker, conception tracker, heifer tracker.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_01What I like about them is that it'll actually include animals that have left the herd when you're analyzing a decision. You know, if you just generate a run a report, it'll say, okay, you've got 200, 200 milking cows, you know, 40, 30 dry cows. Let's talk about the animals on your farm. When you want to do a look back, you're cheating yourself or you're you're you're not taking an accurate look if you exclude all the animals that have gone. So if I want to look at eight years of timed AI, there they're not gonna be very many from eight years ago, but all their data is still in the software, and you can run a report and look at it. In the old days, we had three and a half inch floppy disks that you would back up so that just in case something happened to the PC, you don't lose all your records. Now, for a number of years now, they've offered that DRMS will actually do a cloud backup for you constantly. Like it'll sync it every day. What that allows is now we have both a local copy on your PC of everything that's the information on every cow, it's it's right there to see. But with a cloud backup, you can actually generate reports on the cloud or generate alerts on the cloud. So if you have a a consultant that wants to sit in their office and look at all of their herds and say, How's how is Central Manor Dairy doing this? Since we're backing it up every day, they've got live insight into what's happening in the herd if we give them permission, obviously. And so that no, they no longer have to be on the farm and run the report on the PC while they're there. So that's that's a feature we utilize. How long am I allowed to keep talking about features I like? We can go a little further. Go ahead. Probably at some point you're gonna ask about the mobile application. Right.
SPEAKER_04That was one of one of one of our next things, yes.
SPEAKER_01Oh well, you asked what I like, I'm gonna bring it up now. They started out quite a number of years ago with a very basic mobile app. It was actually on on Palm Pilot devices, uh-huh. And since then have re-architected it, and now there's a mobile app for I have an Android phone that'll synchronize with the PC in the office. And my number one use for that is just cow lookup. See a cow and wonder I have a question about her. I could either walk 200 yards back to the office, type a few keys and have the answer, or I could dig into my pocket, tap three or four times and have the answer there. It could be, you know, a case of mastitis, what's her treatment history? Is there a culture result that's there? That could be a cow and he. Is she in the call list? Is she before voluntary waiting period? Is she breeder today? It could be the hoof trimmer is looking at a cow, like what happened to her uh six months ago or three months ago, what did we do? And and all those treatment records are there. There are options there to do input. You know, if you want to change your group number, you can do it on the phone. It's that's that's up to the user. My personal preference is to do all of my input back in the office, sit down, type this stuff in, hit sync, and then it's it's on the phone. But if that's what you want to do, you can also do do input out in the barn with it.
SPEAKER_04Kind of replaces the old notebook in the pocket thing, huh?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. No, I I'm a I'm a big fan of clipboards and paper and pen. Okay. So I'll print I'll print a report out from Dart that has a checklist, you know, if you're giving shots, giving vaccines, and cross them off versus handle my phone over a manor alley. And juggle that at the same time. Right. But if but if it's your thing, I mean there's options to one an RFID tag in a cow's ear and have that cow's records show up on the phone. So there's a lot of tools and you could pick and choose what you want. I've just found the ones that are there most useful to me. The newest thing is folks that don't have an Android phone can get a lot of the features from Pocket Dairy, the mobile app. Got a lot of those features in the cloud anyway. So just use your phone browser and you can do that as well, no matter what type of device you have. If you have a tablet, laptop, iPhone, Android, you can look up the web version.
SPEAKER_04There's many farms that have multiple technologies that are generating information. What do you have and how do you manage all that data together?
SPEAKER_01We've got a collection. So it's just, you know, two dozen collars that will rotate between animals. When one gets conceived is conceives and gets checked pregnant, we'll move the collar over to another one. That data, that system needs to know the heifer's number, what pen she's in, if she was bred or not. And that system will integrate with Dart. So I do single entry. I tell our heifer 999 is in pen 12, and now both systems automatically know her age, her pen, what what group she's in, whether she got bred or not. I just do single entry in Dart. Our milking parlor runs on the GEA. Milking parlor runs on dairy plan. Within dairy plan, I'm going to open that up if I want to look at a live view of the milking parlor and see which cows on which side, or if there's a milk alarm list. I'll open that program, but I don't need to enter any changes in dairy plan. I still have Dart as my hub of where I go to to enter any any information. Now I can utilize the features of that other program. It does a great job of generating like a milk alarm list of saying, hey, you should look at these three cows. So give an example of three cows that maybe are off milk a little bit today. I can set the sort gate and have them sorted out, take my stethoscope and thermometer, go check out the cows. And if something needs to be done, I just enter it in Dart, change your group number if necessary, assign a treatment code. And now Dairy Plan knows that I changed your group number, what the health code was, what happened. So it's just single entry. You're not giving up the interface with the with the other system. You're still utilizing that, but you don't have to do double entry. The third one that I use is SmaxTech. We have both rumination and activity boluses in most of our cows, and there it'll synchronize as well. So they will generate alert if I have a cow that's you know due to calves soon, and it can censor rumination and body temperature and give me an alert that she's about to calve. I'll get a push notification on my smartphone. None of that involves Dart. But then when she does calve, I'll open up Dart, enter the sex of the animal, calving ease score, whatever, and it'll push that data back to SmackStech so that I don't have to do entry there. So it's keeping everything in sync. They have a number of interfaces, quite a long list that I'm not guaranteeing everything, but a lot of the popular milking parlors and activity monitors are there. Uh there's an integration with hoof trimmers and have software. And if at very least, if there's some way that you want to push data out of Dart into something else and there's not a dedicated interface, you can actually run reports, you know, run an Excel file or a CSV file on a schedule and just export it to have it there in your PC. If there's some you know homebrew thing you want to do, there are options for it. It's pretty flexible.
SPEAKER_04How do you feel that this integration and the be able to use all these different technologies? How important is that to you?
SPEAKER_01I'll talk about myself briefly, but then maybe try to push that off so folks can think about it for their own operation. Everyone needs a hub, a central place that it's your core record keeping system. And there are plenty of organizations that want to be that for you. We chose Dart to be that because we're committed to the DHIA testing and milk samples. The software is fully featured. We we can could run the reports that we want, we can make changes, we can interface with everything else. It's a great get central location. There are plenty of folks that choose to use their milk and parlor software or their robotic milk or software as the hub, as the main thing. If it works well with others, that's a good candidate to be your central location. And for us, Dart has remained there because it works well with others. It's not asking me to give up features or to to give up something that I want in order to become the hub it already is.
SPEAKER_04Having this herd information available, how does that change how you make decisions?
SPEAKER_01The first decision was I needed to go on Amazon and order two more monitors for my PC. Because when when when we had a breeding wheel on the wall, there was only one thing to look at. You had a a notebook that you know it did vet check and you moved all the pegs around. There was one interface. If you want to utilize the alerts and the graphs and the tools that these other interfaces have, it's just a practical thing, but I put them on a second monitor. Dart, I have three screens in front of me, darts in the center, dairy plans on the right, SmackStech, and Cow Man and Cow Scout are on the left.
SPEAKER_05Okay.
SPEAKER_01And use the features that are most useful from your from your other systems. Because they they put a lot of thought and energy into their algorithms and their graphs and and the the interface. And I think they deserve to be to be utilized. But I'm constantly cross-referencing her health history on Dart or doing an entry in Dart to change something. And so just as a very practical thing, multiple monitors and use each one for what it's what it's good for.
SPEAKER_04And you mentioned the Pocket Dairy before. Can you tell me any more about that?
SPEAKER_01The way that the the the classic core pocket dairy product works is it's a native Android app that you install via the sideload the app onto your device and synchronize it with Dart. So it will still continue to work if you don't have cell signal, if there's no internet, if somebody has a tablet that doesn't have a data plan enabled, it is an over-the-wi-fi synchronization. The and that's branded as Pocket Dairy. It's fast, like you you tap on it, it's super responsive, it really easily navigates. The the newest generation of things coming out, a lot of the development work, is on the cloud-based mobile app for looking at those. And there, it's any device anywhere. If you log in, you can pull it up. So it's not as restricted to just Android devices. The synchronization happens through the cloud, obviously. Every time you back up your Dart application, it goes there, and then all the devices see the same information after that. Uh, I just have a a bit of it's not nostalgia, it's just comfort level with using Pocket Dairy because it's so fast and easy. You're often in the middle of something else trying to get chores done and have to answer a question about a cow. That muscle memory of tap on the icon, tap in a cow number, and all the information, their whole health history is right there in front of you.
SPEAKER_04You talked, you mentioned briefly about that you you work with your local DHIA. So, how does that relationship with them support your operation and and how do you get the most value out of the herd data working with them?
SPEAKER_01We do monthly milk tests. So we're an owner sampler at some farms, they'll have a technician come and actually do the sample in one farm.
SPEAKER_05Right.
SPEAKER_01And we get extremely fast response times. I don't know if this is true for every affiliate across the country and every farm, but if we test in the afternoon and send the samples off to the lab, very often the middle of the next morning. Dart, it's in all the applications you can view to use that data. So quick responses. I actually probably get the most value out of just flagging any somatic cell count that's elevated, you know, some of the clinical mastitis. We get a lot of value out of them compiling the fat and protein and production data to kind of give us a scorecard in our cows.
SPEAKER_05Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_01We've started breeding a significant number of the animals to Angus semen in order to get that cross-bred calf, a higher value, bull or heifer calf out of them. And so the choice then is which animals do you breed to that? You can look at it organized it so we can look at the genetic value of those animals based just on their parentage, or you can look at the actual production value from the animal and say, how did she do first, second lactation compared to her herdmates, and then say we'll rank them and say, hey, the bottom third this week, we're gonna breed to Angus, the top third, and we'll breed to Holstein, or if we want to, we can breed to sex Holstein to guarantee a Holstein calf. But the affiliate and DRMS put together all of that in a way that's easy for us to make decisions about the animals, especially that that merit ranking that we want to use when selecting to breed to Angus. Our affiliate offers a few other services beyond just taking milk samples and uploading data to DRMS. I have a forage lab, a pregnancy lab that you can use milk and blood tests, a microbiology lab to test for mastitis pathogens. There's one that uses DNA lab that we can actually use preserved samples. So one test day, you can pick some other services to be offered in addition to just getting the fat protein somatic cell cap.
SPEAKER_04Then, from your perspective, what makes their the DRMS approach different than other technologies that we have?
SPEAKER_01Well, you'd have to ask somebody who's tried the other technology. Yeah. There's a saying that the guy who owns it Buick doesn't is the only one who doesn't know how good it is or how bad it is because he's never had anything else. Uh I don't have I'm not the best person to to give the merits or the or the issues with another approach, but I can say that there's not a question that I can't make it to try to find a good answer to.
SPEAKER_05Right.
SPEAKER_01Using the data that's in front of us. It takes a little bit of practice to navigate through the program. They they'll offer workshops or one-on-one support if there's some feature you want to use or don't know what feature to try out. But we've had you know some consultants or someone trying to sell us something, and we'll have to look at data in a new way and tease it out. It takes a little bit of time, but it's it's a fun exploration for me. Yeah. And we've got the tools there to do it if you have the time to learn and and uh are willing to ask for help when when it's not obvious.
SPEAKER_04Can you share an example about a time that the DRMS has helped you solve some problem there?
SPEAKER_01Just yesterday, actually. We've been using utilizing Smaxtech boluses mainly for preventing metabolic disorders and treating them promptly if something happens to a cow, especially a transition cow. We've been using them for heat detection, but we've still maintained our time to AI protocol. It's like where every first service that a cow gets is based on a double off-sync protocol. So she's gonna be a time breeder. We could potentially look at eliminating that shot protocol and just trusting the bolus and breeding whenever they show up in heat. And so out of curiosity, we looked at what's our what's our conception rate for animals on a bullet bred off of activity on a bolus versus our timed AI. And when you look at the the big overall picture of just one breeding trigger versus the other, timed AI did better. But that's not the complete story. We we only have boluses in like three-year-olds and older on our herd, a little bit unique. If we exclude all of those younger animals that are only timed AI for first service, they actually get closer to each other. And then if we exclude first service, because everyone gets timed AI, and let's just take a population of old cows who've had a timed AI, and let's compare the bolus heats versus a resync and look at the conception right there, then it's a different story. They're actually identical within one or two percentage points over the last five years. And we would have come to a different conclusion if we looked at a just a big overview and didn't didn't slice the data up correctly. So Dart has the the has the tools to allow you to answer really granular, small, specific questions about what you're doing in your farm.
SPEAKER_04How has having this reliable herd data influenced the success, the overall success of your farm over several years?
SPEAKER_01Our overall goal as an operation is to do what's best for the people. We're family members who have, you know, we we love our farm, we love our animals, but we the primary reason for doing any of this is for our families and our time with our families. To in order for that to be successful, though, your farm needs to be, you know, financially viable, it needs to perform well, you actually need to care for and you need to love your your cows too. Family's number one thing, taking good care of cows is the second thing. We are trying to be progressive in and maybe it's not I hope it's not a bad word, but to be to manage things intensively. I don't know if you know much about farm prices or land prices in a lot of the different parts of the country, but we're constrained here with our ability to grow just based on the high cost of ground. Right. And so we've chosen to take the footprint that we have and manage it really intensively with crops, take the number of animals that we have, and in rather than invest in efficiency through scale, efficiency through technology, through better ventilation, better housing, you know, the equipment that allows the cow to live a happier life. And so one of those parts of managing intensively is constantly you know being able to make the exact right decision for every single animal. Run a tight ship, don't let cows slip through the cracks. When it is time to say goodbye to a cow and and make a good accurate time of when when you should put her on a truck and send her up the road, do that promptly when it should be done. Just run a tight ship and don't have much slack in the system. And having the right records lets you do that.
SPEAKER_04Any major lessons that you've learned along the way here?
SPEAKER_01One of the best is my own fallibility. Sometimes I'll have an idea, maybe it's a gut instinct, and be open to either another person or the data telling you you're wrong. With enough results, with enough time, the data will always prove out. You can delude yourself, but you can't delude the cows and their and their performance and and outcomes. So it takes a bit of humility to look closely at your records and realize. I'll give a brief example. We saw a good milk production year in 2025, like really high production, good components, good production from the cows. I didn't change anything significantly from 24 and 23, but we saw this bump. It was a forage quality, not any, not no brilliance by me, or you know, some investment in a piece of equipment. We had really dry year. The corn didn't put a lot of lignin in its stalk, it didn't grow super tall, it was drought stressed, and it got a little rain at the end of the year, put good ears on the stalk. So good digestibility, good starch, and they made a lot of milk on that in that corn silage. We're looking at 2026, and it's down a tick. This isn't a dart specific thing, but when you have the data in front of you to see what the quality of the corn silage was, is anything different with the cows with days in milk or you know, components or anything else? We can took an overall look at the farm and say, um, did I make a wrong choice somewhere? Are we just working with the corn salad with the forages that we have this year and things are good? Like is there a problem or is there not? Today, looking at everything, I'm pretty confident that there's not a problem. We're just at a with a good product level of production, not a great one. And it's a result of where we're at with the with those inputs.
SPEAKER_04What do you see in the future as you look forward to you know years ahead? Any anything that you can see coming down the pike that you'd love to work with?
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm I'm impressed right now with the adoption rate of this sensor technology, whether it's something in line in the milking parlor that's sampling or testing the milk as it comes out, whether it's a camera watching a cow's gait as she walks past the camera and saying, hey, this is an early, you know, early lameness and a food issue coming on with the internal sensors that different companies are making. That now that now that the actual technology inside is is mass-produced for smartphones and other electronics, the price is coming down. And it's far better to get a really early heads up on a metabolic issue than it is to treat it when it becomes severe.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_01And so this is these are these are good outcomes for the farmer, the good outcomes for the cows. We got to double check if they're cost effective. You have to pencil it out. Are we getting enough where where does the money come from to pay for this camera, this sensor, or this system? And I I use Dart for that as well. It's like, okay, let's estimate and and calculate what what a time to eye protocol costs in the drug cost. What milk loss could we expect if we actually have a case of displaced abomaser actosis or something? So let's let's pencil out the money saved by an investment here, or maybe it's just not worth it and you don't do it. But you you need good comprehensive and rearward-looking data, uh, even on cows that have left to get some of those answers.
SPEAKER_04Like you mentioned before, the the the data that has happened in years past, not just what's current.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you can't you can't throw the data away when the cow leaves. Right. You need you need to uh include her for for better or worse. We we should give her credit when she's a has a great experience and we should you know take it into account if we had one that didn't.
SPEAKER_04Thank you, Steve. Anything else that you wanted to mention before we wrap up?
SPEAKER_01I don't think so. It's been a pleasure talking with you. I hope folks can get some some insights or at least have some ideas to think about as listed to it, and really glad to come on.
SPEAKER_04Good. Well, thank you. As as dairies manage increasing volumes of information from all these multiple technologies that we hear about every day from all different parts of the farm, having accurate standardized herd records becomes really important. And it supports the decisions and making them informed decisions in in herds every day, just like his. So to learn more about Dart herd management software from DRMS, visit drms.org. I'm Connie Cooper with SteelPro Silage Barrier Film by Connor AgriScience. And as we start the planting process here all over the country, harvest is not far behind. So please let us know if we can help you at Connor Agroscience. You've been listening to Dairy Voice by Dairy Business News. Please subscribe, like, and share this podcast. And as you climb up on those tractors this spring, I'll remind you to stay safe out there. Thanks for listening, everyone, and we'll talk again soon.