Are your dairy records healthy?
This was a question I asked in a blog post not too long ago to talk about the importance of keeping track of health records. I don't think it's a secret that keeping track of health and production records is a core practice... and will help producers make meaningful decisions when troubleshooting transition cow issues. However, if I've learned one thing through my years of working with cow records - it's that there are major benefits to recording cow data properly.
One area that perhaps has been underestimated in value, is the practice of keeping complete health records. Recently in the industry there has been a big push to track this information more completely so that we can better understand how to improve cow health through genetics. You can read more about that in my blog post, Are your dairy records healthy?
In this article I want to talk about the benefits of having that information available. The DHI-Plus software suite has a long-standing reputation of having an easy way to input and keep track of large amounts of cow data. DHI-Plus has also had health records available for many, many years. Recently, we announced an update to our DHI-Plus mobile service that includes hospital reports.
These new reports provide key demographics for cows going in and out of the hospital by day, the average number of days cows are staying in the hospital, and a breakdown of the reason cows are treated and in the hospital pen. This is useful information as you establish treatment protocols with your staff. One DHI-Plus user told me, "I'm going to review this report with my treatment crew on a weekly basis - this is valuable data!"
If you are currently using the DHI-Plus mobile service, the Hospital reports are already available. All you need to do is ensure that your hospital pens are identified, and there are ways in both the DHI-plus and EZfeed systems to do that.
The following video will walk you through some of the reports and also how to ensure that information displays properly:
I hope you can see the benefit to keeping track of health records... and even more so, I hope this addition to our mobile service makes it more convenient for you to use that information and manage the hospital cows effectively.