Annabel Harris
North Canterbury Veterinary Clinics
"From early on I could see the benefits of accessing
a lot more information via computer, rather than
chasing down bits of paper at critical times of the
year. Invariably some of the data would be missing
and you would end up making decisions with only
part of the picture in front of you."
With an average herd size of 750 cows across their
client base, access to whole herd data is increasingly
important to North Canterbury Veterinary Clinic’s staff
and their farmer clients.
Practicing vet Annabel Harris is one of a new
generation of tech savvy vets who has gone out of her
way to understand and introduce Infovet to her large
dairy herd clients.
She is particularly impressed with the programme’s
pregnancy testing module which allows scanning
data to be uploaded to MindaPro.
In mid-December early scanning coupled with mating
data quickly revealed the effectiveness of a noncycling
cow treatment programme for one client.
"We knew early on that we had achieved a 47%
conception rate in treated non-cycler cows. This
reassured the farmer that non-cycler intervention
was effective on his farm."
The majority of her clients are on MindaPro. With the web based Infovet
platform, Annabel is able to access this data which is coupled with
information from other sources including veterinary history and Fonterra
milk collection data. This dramatically increases her ability to tune into
what's really going on in her client's herds.
The ability to export data to Excel and carry out advanced manipulation
expands the programme's flexibility and allows for tailored analysis of
herd scenarios. Mastitis management and drying off decisions are areas
involving multiple data sets that include bulk cell counts, individual cow
data and veterinary history of mastitis treatment through the year.
Alerts are loaded into her programme that signal when she has clients
with bulk SCC's climbing over 200,000 (orange alert) or 300,000 (red) over
a five day rolling average. This allows immediate communication with the
farmer and the implementation of appropriate actions.
Annabel's experience in identifying, treating and tracking a herd with
chronic mastitis problems is the subject of a presentation she is giving
at this year's International Dairy Federation Conference. Using Infovet
she was able to identify a high incidence of mastitis in a herd's heifers.
Implementation of a preventative program saw the incidence drop by
95%. On-going monitoring with Infovet will help reveal any further issues
around lactation mastitis to be dealt with in the future.
"Infovet gives me the ability to track the effectiveness of a treatment
within and between farms and is helping us develop our consulting ability
and identify problems before they become major," says Annabel.