Serving the farming industry across East Anglia for over 40 years
A bespoke training service aims to help dairy farmers and their vets improve herd health and reproduction planning by better monitoring. The new MSD... Monitoring support to aid herd health planning

A bespoke training service aims to help dairy farmers and their vets improve herd health and reproduction planning by better monitoring.

The new MSD Animal Health Insights service will provide practical information training – delivered by an veterinary advisor – based on the needs of individual dairy herds, farmers and their managers.

Three phases

“No two farming systems are the same, and no two dairy herds have identical requirements in terms of heat, health and wellbeing monitoring,” explains MSD Animal Health regional veterinary advisor Liz Cresswell.

The new service is made up of three main phases, the first phase combines an initial session after a new SenseHub Dairy system has been installed to outline the basics of the monitoring technology to the farmer and any relevant staff alongside identifying the farm’s key goals.

Parameters

Held within three months, the second session familiarises vets with the system and identifies key parameters and insights that will help them to address any specific herd challenges and problems encountered.

Finally, a third session sets joint goals and actions to focus on optimising herd performance by maximising the efficient use of data collection and its subsequent analysis.

Dr Cresswell said. “Data collated and analysed by SenseHub can provide a wealth of useful insights into how the dairy herd is performing, but many farmers and vets are only using the system’s most basic features.

“The next logical step is therefore for us to empower farmers with additional resources so that they can get the best results from their investment in herd monitoring. We also want to enable farm vets to confidently use the realtime data generated.”