Many of you in Lancs will already be aware of the health reporting tool that the team use to report herd health stats. It’s been used for a number of years and has recently been undergoing an upgrade to make it more functional. Ian gives us some more information on what it can do.

It’s pretty exciting to do some upgrades to our health tracker knowing how valuable it’s been to our data reporting over the years.

The upgrade has made it an online version – officially in the cloud – that will give us greater flexibility for future analysis and make the reports a little more streamlined. It has also meant that this service is available across all of our practices.

The tool is a way for our teams to gather health incidence data about your farm and keep an ongoing picture of what is going on and allows us to monitor trends over time. We collect data at the end of each routine and input it to this now online tool.

What we have found over the years is that it is amazing when you review a years worth of data and it clearly shows you where there are areas to focus on.

For example one herd that we started this with a year ago and I go to the routine every two weeks. Each time they maybe have one calf scour and one pneumonia and the farm has just under 200 cows. They rear about 100 calves a year but that trend continued over the year and it meant that at the end they have 26 and 27 cases of scour and pneumonia respectively.

The farmer didn’t perceive that there was a calf disease issue and neither did I because half the animals weren’t sick all at once.

When we analysed the figures, it worked out that calf disease incidence was over 50%. We have picked up on numerous examples like this because we were pro-actively recording the data.

Now that it is online it is much easier for us to offer it to all our clients. Please mention to one of our vets if you are keen. We are currently working on a beef and sheep version too which we will tell you more about when the time is right!

Reporting Examples:

These are just a few of the graphs that can be generated from the upgraded health tracker. Each area also features anonymous benchmarking from similar herds.

What's your trend? DigiFarm

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