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Wales Shed
By wellcalf
CASE STUDY: Blaenglowon Farm
Using farm data to improve calf environment and boost growth
Dairy 350 cows 150 calves
Read how calf insights together with a strong focus on rearing environment is making an impact at Blaenglowon.
Calves
Health
monitoring
tags
Weight Gain
DLWG
Environment
Introduction
Blaenglowon Fawr is a livestock farm in Wales, rearing sheep and cattle. 100 calves are bought in each spring and initially reared in a housed system ahead of turnout for late summer grazing.
Challenge
While livestock records were always meticulously collected, a lack of time and resource to analyse and fully use the data was a regular problem. The challenge was to present information in a quick and easy-to-understand manner and help draw out the key factors which contributed to underperformance and variation between groups and between rearing sheds.
Solution
Smartbell tags were applied to all the calves as they entered on farm. On the Smartbell Premium app, group data, treatments and weights were added through the mobile phone and at the point of treatment rather than back in the office. This data was combined automatically in the app with the information received from the monitoring Smartbell tags.
Previously, there was no comparison done between the 2 sheds which housed animals and the app provided instant graphs comparing the rate of treatments, weight gain and health alerts between the two groups. This clear and easy to understand information, presented in graphics and user friendly tables immediately highlighted difference in performance and variation in the different shed batch results.
I’d never realised before the impact of the shed environment on the calves, but after seeing the number of health alerts on the app, I decided to improve the ventilation in shed 2 bringing immediate benefits to performance and animal health.
Results
Obvious variation between sheds 1 and 2 led to building alterations and improvements.
3x less Smartbell health alerts for Shed 1
19% Growth for Shed 1
