Tipperary farmer advocates for the use of SenseHub health monitoring technology to reduce antibiotic use on farm.
Background
Dairy farmer, Eoin Doorley from Lacka, just outside of Birr in North Tipperary, recently won his first club hurling final for Carrig and Riverstown in 25 years. As a father of two young boys and an avid hurler, staying fit and healthy is a priority for Eoin and so he has adapted his enterprise to sustain a positive work-life balance.
Eoin took over the 59 hectare grassland dairy farm from his parents Tony and Kathleen in 2013, the same year he married his wife Joanna. In the last ten years, he has steadily grown the herd, which is made up of mainly Pedigree Holstein along with some Norwegian Red and Montbéliarde, from 70 to a 100 cows.
“I want to build a bridge between dairy farming and our off-farm lifestyle. We could stay on the farm late each night but I try to finish milking here between 6 and 6.15 each day. I have two young kids at 6 and 8 and they are getting very busy now with sports. I like to keep fit myself, either go for walks or go for a hike or go for a cycle with my young fellas. It is up to us as farmers to manage our time to suit us,” he said.
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The Role of Technology
Eoin studied Ag Science in UCD and qualified in 2002 before going on to work as an environmental planning consultant. He believes that farming is going to have to undergo major changes in order to meet the many challenges it faces in terms of environmental impacts, antimicrobial resistance and attracting the next generation farmers.
He believes that incorporating technology into farming practises is the way forward. “Technology in the future is going to play a very important part of farming and we can use the data to whatever advantage we want. Be that, early diagnosis of sick animals to reduce antibiotic use, reducing the need for extra labour on the farm, going to an underage hurling match or hurling myself, the farm needs to be set up so that it is not going to take a step back because I am not there,” he said.
With this in mind, Eoin installed Allflex SenseHub monitoring technology on his farm 12 months ago. According to Eoin the cow collars which gather information about the animals to send heat and health alerts directly to his SenseHub app ‘is more user friendly than any other app on your phone’.
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“The benefit of the app in early diagnosis was that I was able to treat the animals straight away. It identified animals at an earlier stage when they were sick and I was able to follow their grazing patterns, their movement patterns and rumination and give all of that information to the vet next morning. After the animal was treated, I was able to continue to remotely monitor the sick animal and could instantly see that the diagnosis and the administration of drugs were working. The technology meant that the animal was identified earlier, treated quickly and back in the herd at full production much faster”.
Heat Detection
While fertility, submission and six-week calving rates weren’t a major issue on the farm, for Eoin’s Dad Tony, a seasoned AI man, the heat detection capabilities of the technology have been a revelation. “I have been working at AI for over 50 years and of course the key to successful AI is knowing when your cows are in heat. If you are to be very successful at heat detection you need to watch your cows four times a day which can be really labour-intensive and require a lot of skill. The great thing about SenseHub is that the information comes to you directly on your phone without you needing to spend so much time on the farm,” he said.
