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You can’t be everywhere. But SenseHub can

Farming today is tougher than ever. Herds are larger, labour harder to find and the pressure to keep animals healthy and productive has never been higher.

Yet every stage of a cow’s life is critical: how calves are raised affects their future fertility, how transition cows are managed impacts their next lactation, and how nutrition is monitored shapes short and medium-term performance.

SenseHub Dairy offers another set of eyes and ears on every animal, at every life stage, every minute of the day.

A cow’s journey with SenseHub Dairy.

1. Calf & Heifer
Growth <12m

Key Challenges:
Newborn calves are extremely vulnerable to diseases like scours and pneumonia — responsible for over 50% of calf mortality globally (USDA NAHMS, 2020). Early identification of subtle behaviour changes (such as reduced activity or feeding) is critical, as calves often mask signs of illness until it’s advanced.

Why Monitoring Matters:
Continuous behaviour monitoring enables early alerts when calves deviate from their normal patterns, helping farmers act before the illness becomes severe — improving survival rates and long-term performance.

2. Breeding Heifer 1-2yrs

Key challenges:
Heifers must grow efficiently to meet target breeding weights and puberty timing. Poor nutrition, silent heats, and subclinical illness can delay reproductive readiness — increasing lifetime costs and reducing milk yield potential.

Why monitoring matters:
Monitoring feeding, activity, and estrus behaviour allows farmers to ensure heifers are growing well and breeding at the optimal time — reducing age at first calving, a major predictor of lifetime productivity.

3. Transition Period

Key Challenges:
This is the most critical stage in a cow’s lifecycle, accounting for 80% of all dairy cow health problems (LeBlanc et al., 2006). Risk of milk fever, retained placenta, displaced abomasum, and metritis is highest.

Why Monitoring Matters:
Monitoring behaviour, rumination, and milk indicators around calving helps farmers act early — reducing disease incidence, protecting fertility, and supporting a smoother return to production.

4. Reproduction & Fertility Management

Key challenges:
Heat detection accuracy is often below 50% on farms relying solely on visual observation (Fricke et al., 2014). Missed or mistimed inseminations lead to increased open days, culling, and lower profitability.

Why monitoring matters:
Monitoring technology provides real-time, detection of heat, silent estrus, and irregular cycles, improving insemination timing and conception rates and reducing reproductive losses.

5. Lactation & Milk Monitoring

Key Challenges:
Milk production is influenced by a complex interaction of nutrition, health, and behaviour. Cows in early lactation face intense metabolic demands, making them vulnerable to mastitis, ketosis, and other production-related diseases. Disruptions in rumination or feed intake often signal issues before clinical signs appear. Without monitoring, milk quality losses may remain undetected until somatic cell counts rise or symptoms are visible — impacting performance, profitability, and cow well-being.

Why Monitoring Matters:
Early lactation is a high-risk, high-impact period. Monitoring rumination, activity, and somatic cell count helps farmers detect health or nutritional challenges before they affect milk yield or quality. By spotting early warning signs, farmers can take action sooner — protecting both cow well-being and consistent milk production.

6. Dry-Off & Culling Management Systems

Key challenges:
In later lactation, subtle declines in performance or undetected health issues can reduce milk income and increase culling rates. Poorly managed dry-off can also increase mastitis risk.

Why monitoring matters:
Lifetime data helps spot gradual changes in performance or behaviour — guiding better dry-off timing, selective dry cow therapy, and long-term herd replacement decisions. It helps farmers make better management decisions to ensure a cow is rested properly and its well-being is optimal to be ready for the next lactation.

Trusted Worldwide by >16,000 Farmers

It’s the only behaviour monitoring system in the world to monitor animals across their full lifetime starting from day 1.

Our technical support teams are world-class, wherever you are, whenever you need us, we’re with you, always.

Real farmers. Real results.

“We’re managing to treat cows, get them back into milk well, feeding, eating quicker. We’re experiencing less losses, down to the fact that we have instant alerts of cows & calves, as soon as they go ill.”

Steffan Richards, 
UK

“I could no longer do without this technology; it has become part of my daily routine: now the first thing we do when we arrive at the farm in the morning is consult SenseHub.”

Laura Franchi, 
Italy

“Thanks to SenseHub we can invest more time in our cows and their well-being, but also spend more time with our family and our hobbies”

Louisa Backhaus,
Germany

References

USDA National Animal Health Monitoring System (NAHMS). (2020). Dairy 2014: Health and Management Practices on U.S. Dairy Operations, 2014. United States Department of Agriculture, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), Veterinary Services.
Soberon, F., & Van Amburgh, M. E. (2013). The effect of nutrient intake from milk or milk replacer of preweaned dairy calves on lactation milk yield as adults: A meta-analysis of current data. Journal of Animal Science, 91(2), 706–712. https://doi.org/10.2527/jas.2012-5834
Fricke, P. M., Carvalho, P. D., Giordano, J. O., Valenza, A., Lopes, G., Amundson, M. C., & Wiltbank, M. C. (2014). Reproductive performance of lactating dairy cows after presynchronization with Double-Ovsynch or G6G and timed AI with Ovsynch. Theriogenology, 81(5), 682–689. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.theriogenology.2013.12.018