Cross-breeding for longevity, and switch to autumn calving, aided by herd monitoring tech

Matt Humphry farms with his parents, Mark and Belinda, at Southey Farm near
Taunton where the family has been a tenant on the Duchy of Cornwall Estate for
five generations.

Ten years ago the herd converted from a spring and autumn calving pattern to an autumn-only system, with cow numbers increasing from 270 to 400 over the last six years. During the same period, Mark and Matt have experimented with a new crossbreeding strategy to produce a resilient and easy to manage cow, with a herd monitoring system recently installed to improve heat detection and improve quality of life for the herd’s management team.

“We started experimenting with crossbreeding 20 years ago when we had the opportunity to buy some Jersey cross heifer calves at a good price,” Mark explains. “Since then, we’ve tried everything from Swedish Red and Montbéliarde genetics, but it’s since we started using Norwegian Reds and Fleckviehs that we’ve seen some really significant gains, with the strong feet of the Norwegian Red and sturdiness of the Fleckvieh helping us to gain an extra lactation per cow.”

The herd grazes for as long as possible throughout the year, with turnout date dictated by the weather: “Last year the cows went out on the 31st of January,” Matt explains, “but this year they didn’t see fresh grass until the 12th of April. Even then, the unpredictable weather meant they had to come back in a week later, but it’s that kind of challenge that keeps the job interesting.”

The management of the herd has also been kept interesting over the years with successive tweaks to the herd’s calving schedule. “We originally calved all year round,” Matt continues, “before splitting the herd into spring and autumn groups nine or ten years ago.

“The summer gap gave us breathing space to concentrate on silaging and harvest, but the spring group proved to be more trouble than it was worth, with any cows that failed to conceive in the autumn being pushed into the spring herd. By that time they were either overweight or too old which meant they continued to struggle to conceive or needed assistance
at calving.

“We’ve therefore moved everything to an autumn calving pattern which gives us more time to focus on first cut silage and maize drilling.”

Matt and Mark have also expanded the farm by taking on the Estate’s neighbouring farm to rear youngstock and grow additional forage.

“Our plan was to increase cow numbers by purchasing 100 cows,” Matt explains, “but that idea was abandoned after the first group of 50 cows, when a salmonella outbreak was linked to a previous farm sale purchase which caused 30 to abort.

“We therefore switched our focus to breeding our own heifers, using sexed semen on breeding stock and everything else put to British Blue beef semen. Our aim is to calve everything in very tight window so we’re constantly looking for ways to improve conception rates.”

To that end, a herd monitoring system was installed 10 days before the November 2022 breeding window opened.

“We’d previously applied for a grant to help with the investment but were rejected because we didn’t score highly enough,” Matt explains. “That was probably because we’d already implemented a lot of the environmental schemes that would have boosted our rating, so we were unsure what to do.”

In the end the decision to invest was forced when Mark was scheduled to have an operation on his foot which would have left Matt short-handed on the farm.

“We knew we needed to get something sorted quickly, so we approached four manufacturers, eventually choosing the SenseHub® system based on MSD Animal Health’s understanding of what we were trying to achieve, their ability to meet our short deadline, and their training and aftersales support.”

Heat detection

Prior to installing the SenseHub® system, tail-painting was used to detect heats; a system that not only required staff to check the herd throughout the day, but also at nine o’clock at night.

“We were checking for heats for at least three or four hours a day and still putting too many cows in front of the vet only to find out that many of those we thought weren’t cycling properly had been in heat. We therefore installed the SenseHub® collars to improve heat detection, but their second function – to assess the health of cows – is now just as important.”

While the SenseHub® system can’t diagnose specific ailments, it can detect the behavioural patterns associated with health problems such as decreased activity and reduced rumination.

“We receive a text alert every time the collars detect a change in behaviour which means we can inspect the affected animal 24 hours ahead of time,” Matt explains. “We can then get her into the sick bay before she deteriorates or goes down in a cubicle, and treat her sooner for whatever ailment she’s suffering from. We’re losing less milk as a result and our antibiotic usage has gone down.”

Within a couple of weeks of the SenseHub® collars being fitted the system was already highlighting more heats than could be seen through visual inspections.

“SenseHub® gave us the confidence to stop our evening checks which makes a
huge difference to our quality of life.”

“We’ve seen an improvement in conception rates with the number of days to first service falling from 83 to 69 days, and days to pregnancy falling from 102 days to 85. Submission rates have also improved from 77% to 97%, with the percentage of cows pregnant by 100 days in milk increasing from 49% to 75% and the herd’s expected calving interval coming down from 382 days to 365 days.

“Some of this is a result of delaying the first service date by 11 days to consolidate the block, with the SenseHub® app’s ability to tell us exactly when each animal came into heat and when she’ll be most receptive to AI also being a key factor. SenseHub® has also taught us that we were previously inseminating cows too early which meant we’d invariably end up serving a lot of cows twice.

“We’ve now got fewer empty cows at the end of the breeding season which is vital to keeping the calving pattern as tight as possible, and we’ve been able to knock three weeks off our calving block for 2023. And we’re retaining more young cows as second calvers simply because we’re detecting more silent heats.”

The SenseHub® system has also changed the farm’s culling protocol: “With more cows getting back into calf sooner, we’re no longer forced to cull cows due to poor fertility,” Matt explains. “Instead, culling decisions are based on health parameters, which means the herd is more efficient and more productive.”

Heat detection

Matt and Mark’s next goal is to replace the parlour and to install an automatic segregation gate linked to the SenseHub® system.
“That will make it less time consuming and less stressful to draft cows for AI or veterinary intervention and, just like the eradication of the nightly herd checks, will help to improve our working lives,” Matt describes. “It’ll be like having another pair of hands on the farm, something the SenseHub® system has already achieved: as soon as the collars went on it was as if we had another member of staff on the farm whose sole purpose was to watch the herd around the clock. With reliable, skilled staff becoming frustratingly difficult to find, it’s the ideal solution, especially as we’re now 100% confident in the system’s ability to spot heats and identify potential health issues.”