Herd Management: New features on Lactanet Mobile
- November 27, 2023
Summary: The Lactanet mobile app has new features to help you better manage your herd, such as the Animal Evaluation tool that can assist in evaluating and monitoring cow cleanliness, injuries, lameness, and teat condition on-farm; and the Feed and Management Events tool that can assist you in recording keeping on the farm.
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The Lactanet mobile app is a herd management tool that gives you easy access to individual cow & heifer details, milk recording data, lab results (ex. Preg test and Ketoscreens) and more.
Recently, the Lactnet mobile app has added new features that can help you to better manage your herd. These includes the Animal Evaluation and the Feed and Management Events tool.
Animal Evaluation Tool
Have you ever wondered about the welfare statues of your herd, but found it difficult to evaluate and keep track of? Or have you ever made changes to your barn or management practices and wanted to track the effect it has on your herd? The Animal Evaluation tool in Lactanet app can now help by making it easier to evaluate and monitor cow cleanliness, injuries, lameness, and teat condition on-farm.
This exciting new tool in the app contains descriptions, pictures, and/or videos to facilitate scoring. As well as providing herd summaries of the latest animal evaluation scores, highlighting the number and percentage of cows requiring action out of the animals scored on-farm.
In the app, lameness assessments are available for both in-stall scoring and mobility/gait scoring with video examples to help evaluate and identify lameness behaviours.
The app will also identify lame cows that require follow-up actions using icons, which can be seen in the list of cows when using the lameness assessment tool. The green circle indicates a sound cow, the yellow triangle indicates a mildly lame cow, and the red square indicates a severely lame cow.
The cow cleanliness evaluation feature in the app includes pictures to assist in scoring the cows udder, lower leg, and flank & thigh cleanliness.
The injury evaluation feature includes descriptions and pictures to assist in scoring hock, knee, and neck injuries.
Finally, the teat condition evaluation feature includes pictures to facilitate scoring of all 4 teats individually.
Overall, these new features on the Lactanet mobile app can help facilitate animal evaluation on-farm and assist in identifying herd-level issues and individual animals requiring attention. A report on Lactanet’s MySite linked to the Animal Evaluation tool in the app is also currently in development.
This report will assist in tracking the changes in cow cleanliness, injuries, lameness, and teat condition overtime on both a herd and individual animal level. This can be useful in keeping track of improvements in the cows’ condition after changes are made to the barn design (ex. change in stall configuration) or management practices (ex. change in hoof trimming or foot-bathing practices).
Feeding and Management Events Tool
When the feed representative/nutritionist asks when you started feeding the new corn silage for your lactating cows or your vet asks about the most recent hoof trimming in the dry cows, how can you ensure that your responses are accurate? Or, when observing the milk pick-ups, have you ever noticed a day when the milk production was lower than usual, and yet couldn’t recall the reason why?
It’s not uncommon to rely on memory for such information, but the demanding schedule of a dairy farmer can make it difficult to keep track of all these events. Many of us have turned to paper notepads as a solution, but often, these notes become misplaced or forgotten over time.
To streamline your farm management, the Lactanet app now offers an innovative tool designed to help you record the events happening on the farm. Now, you can use the app to help you record changes in the management and routine, ensuring that no important details slip through the cracks.
You can record detailed events for specific animal groups, including lactating cows, dry cows, heifers, and the entire herd. Events can be categorized into feed–related changes (such as feed quantity, quality, and use of additives), management aspects (including production drops, equipment issues, etc.), health events, routine disruptors (like vaccination, hoof trimming, vet visits), labor changes, and production monitoring (tracking the number of animals in the bulk tank and the last milk delivery quantity).
We designed this tool to help improve the record-keeping practices within your operation. Keeping accurate records helps maintain a detailed history of the farm, which is invaluable for monitoring trends, identifying problems, and making informed decisions. Coming soon, we will connect these events to other Lactanet services like PROFILAB, making the report interpretation easier.
Lactanet Mobile App
Take control of your farm management with ease, right at your fingerprints, through the convenience of the mobile app. The Lactanet mobile app can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play. To activate and receive login details you must contact Lactanet and a low administrative fee is charged monthly for use of the app. To learn more about the Lactanet mobile app please visit the Lactanet website.
