Fertile Ridge Dairy cuts labor and drug costs and improves reproduction with Allflex activity and rumination monitoring system
Fertile Ridge Dairy cuts labor and drug costs and improves reproduction with Allflex activity and rumination monitoring system
2 PagesBACKGROUND Fertile Ridge Dairy, founded in 1903, is a dairy, forage and grain farm located 20 miles southwest of Madison, Wisconsin. Four generations of the Sutter family have owned and managed the farm, milking about 80 cows until 2002, and then rapidly expanding it, first to 400 and, in more recent years, to approximately 600 milking cows. CHALLENGES As the herd continued to grow, the Fertile Ridge team continued to rely on visual observation to identify cows in heat. Joel Sutter, Herd Manager at Fertile Ridge, recalls: “The time and labor we put in trying to visually pick out the animals were very high, but we were still missing some. Also, because so many cows did not show visual signs of heat, we were spending huge amounts on drugs and hormones on ov-synching; we wanted t
