We caught up with Todd Portsmouth from Oxford Farming in Canterbury to find out what he thinks about WelFarm.
Tell us what you like about WelFarm Todd?
We've been using WelFarm for 3 seasons now and we’ve found the data invaluable and it’s presented in an easy to understand format.
I find it really useful when we can benchmark regionally as well as nationally as it keeps us focused to always strive to do better but also shows you what we are doing well.
How are you using the data?
Getting condition scoring done at critical times, like pre dry off or pre mating for instance, enables us to make decisions around management of any lighter animals before it becomes a bigger issue, saving us time and money by acting quicker.
And getting regular locomotion scores done has also been an invaluable tool on this farm as it's helped me to reduce the number of critical lame cows by giving a list of cows to review and check out before they get bad.
Prevention is better than the cure which suits our system!
What else are you finding helpful?
The other really useful thing we get with WelFarm is a breakdown of antibitoics and pain relief usage so we can easily see where we sit on the traffic light system with our drug usage and that is helping us make sure we are not going in with red drugs when we don't need to be.
All the info all goes towards making our animal welfare plan that our dairy company requires so we can submit our WelFarm info which reduces our workload and lets us focus on the areas we should be focused on.
