The upcoming technology hitting the beef industry is about more than tracking cattle and measuring performance metrics, it’s about continuing the American ranching legacy.
“Technology does allow the bridge for past generations and future generations to all exist on the ranch … our job as Ceres Tag is to help future generations continue to increase profit so they can return to the ranch,” says Shane White, national sales manager for Ceres Tag.
Bridging that gap looks a lot like combining cowboy logic and data to eliminate guess work and allow for confident decision-making at the ranch level.
“We are a direct-to-satellite animal behavior automation platform,” White says. “We automate phenotypes including pasture feed intake, grazing behavior, eating behavior and drinking behavior.”
Measuring these phenotypes and providing the data to ranchers by integrating with a number of platforms they already use greatly impacts profitability.
“Understanding the efficiency of turning grass into that calf is really important,” White says. “The number of ways they can use that information to maximize their profit is really as endless as their imagination. We get to show them the efficiency of their cows in their environment … and that’s where the profit really starts to show up.”
While initial measurements of pasture feed intake and animal behavior are initially what set Ceres Tag apart, the company and tag offer much more than that.
“We are launching the Ceres Generation 6 device that will have a suite of advanced reproductive capabilities — estrous alerts, calving alerts and mounting scores,” White says.
What does this mean for ranchers? Less guessing on which cows are more fertile and which bulls are most active. Daily estrous alerts provide ranchers with information that can be applied in both natural service and artificial insemination scenarios.
“We’re now automating the return-to-cyclicity metrics … selecting females that return to heat in 20 to 25 days rather than 40 to 45 days allows us to shrink calving windows even further,” White says. “I’m not predicting an exact standing heat moment … but definitively this percentage of your herd has had estrous activity on this day with a very high confidence interval.”
In artificial insemination (AI) scenarios, ranchers can better know which cows are best suited to synchronize versus not.
“When we’re doing our preparation for synchronization, we always know there’s a percentage of animals that are in that seven-to-10-day window on either side of their estrus cycle that may or may not react,” White explains. “So when we know which animals are either three days past their cycle or three days from their cycle, we know that if we put a CIDR in and start a synchronization cycle in those females, we’re actually just going to throw them off because they were about to ovulate on their own as is.”
The result? Fewer wasted dollars and a better investment of genetics.
“We can stop wasting semen we would have otherwise wasted,” White says. “Those genetics are too important and too powerful to go to waste.”
The mounting scores for bulls also can’t be overlooked as a profit tool.
“Mounting scores tell us which bulls are getting out and working … and also which females are very dominant and riding each other,” White says. “It allows us to see which bulls are working and which ones aren’t … when we spend as much money as we spend on bulls in this country every year, that’s important information.”
Calving alerts are the third feature being rolled out with the new generation of the Ceres Tag.
“Calving alerts are going to be behavior-based metrics that definitively predict a calving activity going on,” White explains. “Those will be triggered based upon the last data packet that the tag sends. It won’t be an immediate notification but it still allows us to know which animal was calving within the last three to four hours at this point, and it gives us the GPS location of that.”
For those calving out on the range, this can eliminate some guess work and save time.
Why invest in this type of technology as opposed to doing what’s worked for years?
“Understanding reproductive behaviors paired with the energetic cost of making them occur gives us the ability to be far more profitable than we ever have been,” White says.
From feed intake in pasture and dry lot settings to which females consistently cycle, ranchers can sort out the females that truly work in their environment and business model.
Learn more about Ceres Tag and how these algorithms work on the “Casual Cattle Conversations” podcast.
