353 | The Young Dairy Manager Changing Herd Health One Insight at a Time

Shelby Jacquier Washburn, is a fourth-generation dairy farmer and managing partner at Laurel Brook Farm in East Canaan, Connecticut, describes returning from an equine business program during COVID to help manage a 1,500-cow herd and 1,800 acres each of corn and hay/haylage while raising all young stock.

In today's conversation, she explains how accepting a 200-tag Nedap trial led to whole-herd collars (Nedap Now) that detect health issues 12–24 hours earlier via rumination, eating time, and milk deviations, informing earlier treatment and culling decisions, identifying lameness, and paying back about half the system cost in a year through reduced hospital time. Data prompted diet changes for fresh cows, improved heats and overall cow brightness, new transition protocols (moving pre-fresh cows two days before due date) that boosted colostrum supply, and heat-stress monitoring that revealed the parlor as a hotspot, leading to added evaporative cooling, fans, and water.

This episode is part of the High-Performance Mindset Series powered by Nedap. Nedap is future-proofing dairy farming with smart technologies in activity monitoring, cow locating, milk metering, sort gates, and AI-powered camera systems. Nedap is improving life on the farm by putting the right cow in the right place at the right time, every time.

00:47 Meet Shelby Jacquier Washburn
01:14 From Horses to Dairy
03:41 Collars Across the Herd
05:03 The 200 Tag Leap
07:11 Fresh Cow Insights
09:08 Diet Tweaks Big Wins
11:18 Transition Monitoring Shift
12:20 Colostrum Turnaround
14:32 Heat Stress Hotspots
16:48 What's Next in Tech

Видео 353 | The Young Dairy Manager Changing Herd Health One Insight at a Time канала Uplevel Dairy Podcast