Vergaderingsrall Farm - South Africa

Farm/dairy name: Vergaderingsrall       
Number of head: 470 cows        
Breed of cows: Holstein cows, mixed jersey and crossbreed.   
Owners: Bill &Vernon Basson        

Annual milk production averages
We average around 7,000 liters per cow, daily average about 23 liters, 75 % Holstein and 25% mixed jersey and crossbreed

Herd Management
A big role in artificial insemination has been far more effective. And the one significant figure is this year we've done no visual heat-spotting at all. We've not seen a single cow, we've done everything on the computer. It prints out our inseminations for every day and that's what we've based it on. We've done no heat-spotting at all and that's the first year we haven't done it. Heat detection is a breeze.

Generally, throughout your year, I mean, if I spend ten to twenty minutes just running through the reports that I like to look at, that's a lot of time. I mean, I just quickly, I pop in there and have a look at what I need to see, I check my health reports out, if I'm happy with them, that's great. I'll just take out any cow that I want to have a look at and it's, really, it's a breeze. It's very simple.

Customer Service
Our daily average over the last three years has increased from 21 liters to 23 liters per cow. So we've seen a definite improvement. One of the beauties of the system is the fact that, bearing in mind my age and the fact that I'm semi computer illiterate, it's just so easy to maneuver the programs to get the information I want. I look at the cows that are pregnant. I look at the overall picture of those that aren't, what they're producing, those that are, what the conditions, of the animals are, to sort them into groups, to be able to pick out the performance of each individual group as you like.

It just makes it so simple to operate and get the information that I would want which was basically less intricate than the information that the manager would want.