Silent Herdsman™ is ETS’s decision support platform for smart farms that incorporates leading-edge condition based monitoring technology into a low-profile, lightweight collar worn by dairy cows and heifers. The Silent Herdsman collar continuously monitors individual cows’ activity throughout critical periods and automatically detects changes in the cows’ normal behaviour indicating patterns directly related to a variety of critical health-related conditions.
The Silent Herdsman decision support platform is a highly cost-effective herd management solution suitable for dairy farms hosting 100-200 cows up to those farms hosting several thousand cows. Silent Herdsman features a versatile, scalable architecture that includes an application interface that invites easy integration with other herd management and farm applications along with a variety of on-site and mobile communications options.
Detection of heat (oestrus) and other critical conditions is fully automated and highly reliable using our state-of-the-art, proprietary Artificial Intelligence module, which processes data on the collar mounted activity monitor. The Silent Herdsman Artificial Intelligence module has the unique ability to ‘learn’ over time from the captured behavioral data from the given cow – giving it the highly differentiated ability to continuously improve its predictive accuracy for the given cow. The Artificial Intelligence module also has the ability to be trained to capture an individual cow’s behavioral patterns and as such can be deployed globally, despite different farming practices across the world.
The collar records an individual cow’s movements continuously and the data are processed on-collar by the Silent Herdsman Artificial Intelligence module. When the Artificial Intelligence module identifies departures from normal behaviour an event is stored for download to the central data processing/applications center. The transmitting interface(s) within the collar are periodically energized. Only meaningful data are downloaded when a cow enters the receiving area of a base station, located either within the field, or near the milking parlour. This selective data transmission feature greatly extends the battery life of the collar. These transmitted alerts represent activity patterns related to a variety of different critical, health-related conditions – including heat (oestrus).
Just as important as the detection and transmission of relevant data to the decision maker are the simple presentation of these data in the form of alerts as well as the variety of communications media used to present these alerts and the related detailed information. The Silent Herdsman decision support platform transmits data from the collars to the installed base station. The base station can transmit this information to the on-site personal computer as well as to a variety of Web-based, mobile devices – including smart phones, tablet computers, and other portable Web access devices.
"I now have more time to multi-task on the farm knowing that Silent Herdsman is detecting heat electronically across our modern Holstein herd particularly at night while I am sleeping!"
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