Cow Ankle ID straps- Any Good?

[farmer on a bike]

I have taken on a contract farming agreement on a farm with a fast exit parlour which has a big muck tray that covers cows freeze brands. The parlour has auto ID but sometimes it seems to miss cows. Checking is almost impossible without getting out of the pit to read ear tags.

Therefore I am considering buying plastic ankle straps marked with the cows line numbers. I have been quoted £2.30/strap. But how long will the straps last and are they easy to read or do they get quite mucky? Has anyone experience of these type of straps?

 

[jimmer]

on our fully housed cows they get too mucky to read

 

[jimmer]

make of parlour , and is it currently ear tags or collars , or ankles for id ??

 

[farmer on a bike]

Dairymaster, ear tags.

I just want to be able to easily cross check the cow ids showing on the screens

 

[jimmer]

long term or short untill you have confidence in ids ?

 

[farmer on a bike]

Ideally long term, we know one of the ID readers have had to be replaced because it was regularly miss-reading, but it was hard to prove what was happening.

 

[Rossymons]

I'd be cautious of rear leg straps - perfect transport for bugs to to get on udders when they go lie down.

 

[farmer on a bike]

on our fully housed cows they get too mucky to read

Are the numbers printed on? What has retention rate been like?

We do have an auto foot bath, might that help keep them readable?

 

[jimmer]

we had velcro ankle pedometers , , they got caked in muck and wouldnt be readable very quickly , footbathed daily too

plastic ones may be less shitsticktooable though

 

[Beef farmer]

Sounds like a higher input system. Why do you need to individualy read cows?

 

[jimmer]

Sounds like a higher input system. Why do you need to individualy read cows?

they were only for heat detection

above the knee straps would stay cleaner , but retention might suffer

 

[O'Reilly]

Plastic pedometer straps here, always caked in muck. I guess you could try a few and see how it goes, sounds like you need to unless you do something drastic with the parlour.

 

[farmer on a bike]

Sounds like a higher input system. Why do you need to individualy read cows?

How do you know record which cow you have just found with mastitis and treated if you don't know who she is? Maybe you see a lame cow and set it to shed, but if she is one place wrong then you have just set the wrong cow to shed etc, etc.

If I had chosen the parlour it would not be like this but I didn't and I now what I have got work. It does have some good points, cow flow is excellent and it is a nice working environment.

 

[Davy]

Get Dairymaster out to sort the reader boards. Only time ours misses is when a tag has fallen out. After our parlour was installed it would miss quite a few until i got them to spend time with it running a lot of cows through at the same time to get it adjusted.

 

[Rossymons]

I'd agree, get the engineers out to sort it.

I don't know how Dairymaster aerials work but chances are it relies on a continuous loop so check all the welds and nuts and bolts are decent

 

[Agrispeed]

In my experience, plastic leg straps are They ratchet tighter as cows walk and you have to cut them off.

 

[jade35]

Going on the Kerbl leg straps we use for identifying mastitis cases etc. not very long if you wanted to read the number if the engineer cannot rectify the problem, is there another area that you can freeze brand the cow that will be visible in the parlour?

 

[jerseycowsman]

Our westfalia pedometers never fail to be read, as above, sounds like dairymaster need to come and adjust it

 

[Cowski]

We tried the kiwikit leg bands to mark 3/4 cows and found retention wasn't great, back to using tape now

 

[organicguy]

Seen hose pipe and cable ties used. Thinking of using yellow parlour hose to id Johnes cows as two types of leg straps I have used are u.s.