This episode was featured in partnership with SenseHub® Dairy powered by MSD Animal Health.

SenseHub® Dairy is trialling a new alternative to the conventional herringbone swing arm – a move to aid getting other new milking technology into the country’s herringbone sheds where space can be constrained.​

Product Manager for MSD Animal Health’s SenseHub Dairy portfolio, Bryan Parsons, says the prototype has come from the company’s global R&D team and the New Zealand team is working on it locally to ensure it works as required for New Zealand sheds.

“A lot of herringbones have been around for 20+ years, some of them even older,” he says.​

“They’re not built with the room for some of this technology.”​

The arm has not been officially named but is being called Swing Sense internally, a play on the SenseHub Dairy name.​

“It can be installed into existing herringbone sheds, and the beauty here is we can easily swing it from one side to the other with less space required than most existing swing arms available today.”​

For the milker, it also takes some of the lifting, moving and reaching out of getting the cups from row to row.​

Bryan says the swing arm works seamlessly with the company’s milk sensors.

“The data is coming through the sensors, the swing arm provides the extra information via a switch to say ‘I’m left, I’m right’”​ ensuring accurate individual cow identification.”

The swing arm operates as part of the wider SenseHub Dairy system, which identifies each cow on entry to the shed, sets her in the correct bail and records yield, fat, protein, lactose, blood and conductivity through the MilkPlus sensors.

Care of recent developments as part of the company’s ‘smart milking’ offering, it’s now possible for every milking point to provide real-time alerts and individual cow milk insights which can be displayed either via the SenseHub Dairy app on smart phones, the shed computer and now via a new touch screen display located in the pit of the dairy shed. The latest touch screen displays are a new and improved version of a popular feature that until recently has only been accessible for those farmers using the company’s Protrack software.

Richard Doohan, Strategic Market Intelligence Lead, says each device now produces more data than ever before, and the platform’s task is to pull it together and turn this into meaningful and actionable insights.​

“Where we’re going is taking a 10-day decision process and turning it into a few hours, letting you make rapid decisions in short order rather than having to contemplate life for too long,” he says.​

“So you’re no longer spending hours on the platform looking for a cow with tail paint – the list is there for you.”​

He says the newest technology is making the platform’s artificial intelligence more powerful and more useful.

“AI is already built into these products – and in many cases, it was there long before AI was cool.”

He says the work now is in bringing the best of it to the farmer.

This episode is a paid partnership with SenseHub® Dairy powered by MSD Animal Health. To learn more about SenseHub® Dairy’s modular dairy system that combines animal behaviour monitoring, milk intelligence and automation in one connected platform, visit www.sensehub.co.nz

CountryWide CONNECT with Andy Thompson & Sarah Perriam-Lampp is our daily rural show livestreamed from 11am-1pm. Visit country-wide.co.nz on how to watch/listen or download the CountryWide CONNECT mobile app, available on Apple iOS and Android.