Joe O’Rourke farms outside Moate, Co. Westmeath, milking 230 cows, with the help of one full-time staff member and two relief milkers.

In 2018, he upgraded his Alfco transponder-based drafting gate to the new Alfco app-linked gate.

"We aim to have the cups on for 6:00a.m, so myself and Sean, who’s with us fulltime, don’t milk in the evening.

"We wanted to make the system simpler for the relief milkers, so the drafting gate was the first step. After we installed the new gate, I started researching heat detection systems," he said.

Joe decided to install Censortec CowControl, powered by Nedap, for a few reasons.

"When I started asking around, CowControl kept coming up in conversation," he explained.

"The fact that it integrated with our Alfco gate made it a no brainer. It’s seamless.

"Every morning, I check the CowControl app, and see what’s on heat. Then, when we start milking, I just hit ‘Start Milking’ on the Alfco app, and at the end of milking any cow that needs to be served is standing in the drafting pen. It’s simple."

"The drafting gate is for where you have a one-man operation, and he must sort out cows," Kieran Kerrigan of Alfco explained.

"The drafting gate is a piece of equipment where you key in the cow’s number into a keypad at the front of the parlour pit and as the cow exits the milking parlour, it will separate that cow from the rest of the herd. It’s a huge labour-saving device."

Alfco drafting gates come with the option of being app-controlled or controlled via a keypad placed in the milking parlour.

"The gate has made life so much easier. It has never missed a cow. The worst case scenario is that you’ll have an extra cow in the pen if two come together, but that rarely happens," Joe said.

Before the app was introduced, Joe used the keypad in the parlour.

"We still use the keypad for emergencies to pick cows out at the last minute. We hoof pare once a week, and if we miss a cow when we’re making our list for the parer, we can pick her out with the keypad as she goes through the parlour," he said.

"The keypad is handy too for slow cows. If there’s a slow cow holding up the row in the parlour, we draft her out with the keypad and bring her back in at the end to fill up the final row and get her milked out."

Joe and Sean use Censortec CowControl powered by Nedap to manage the cows during pre-breeding. CowControl allows them to easily identify problem cows. Alfco then allows them to select those cows with ease.

"Any cow calved over 40 days without a heat gets flagged on CowControl in the app, and then we pull them out using the Alfco gate," he said.

"They get checked and any issues are sorted before we start breeding. The combination of CowControl and the Alfco gate is irreplaceable when it comes to managing the herd’s fertility."

Joe previously used tail paint for heat detection, and found they had good success with it.

"Tail paint worked well for us, but it was time consuming. It meant an extra person in the parlour twice a week," the farmer said.

"CowControl eliminated that, it’s a great labour saving. We used to use a teaser bull after the first three weeks but CowControl eliminated that too. I’m not getting any younger, and anything that makes life simpler is a big help."

Joe has also started using sexed semen on some cows now that he has reliable data from CowControl.

"We’ve been using sexed semen on maiden heifers. CowControl tells us when the cow started her heat, and that information gives us confidence to use sexed on suitable cows," he said.

"When their habits change, you’ll get an alert, so it needs time to learn their habits, so to speak.

"The information on the cows’ health is fascinating too," he continued.

"Shortly after we put in CowControl last year, Sean found a cow down in the field at 6am. I could see on CowControl that she had been down since 1:00a.m in the morning.

"A fortnight ago we had a cow with a hard calving, and then she got milk fever. She was down for a day, but her activity actually didn’t return to normal until a week after she calved. Information like that changes how you treat cows."

Alfco, Censortec and Cormac Tagging have been working in partnership with several years. Galway-based Cormac Tagging have been providing tags to the Irish market since 2016.

Ursula Kelly, managing director of Cormac Tagging said: "Our tags are more than just pieces of plastic. The increasingly advanced RFID technology and the use of electronics in animal identification offers big labour-saving opportunities for farmers.

"This has become more important now that all animals must be tagged with RFID tags since January of this year."

Joe has been using Cormac tags for about five years now; both button tags which operate the Alfco gate, and cattle tags on the rest of the herd.

"Cormac is superb to deal with. I needed a few replacement tags quickly, and they had them out to us in two days. Service like that is priceless," he said.

"The partnership between Cormac, Alfco and Censortec is really effective. All three companies understand our grass-based system, and the importance of compact calving.

"Any time I’ve had any questions about either CowControl or Alfco, I can get an answer on the phone. If it’s something that can’t be solved over the phone, there’ll be a technician arrive to the yard very quickly. It’s a great service."

Censortec CowControl powered by Nedap has recently released the software program Nedap Now, which allows for integration with other software such as the Irish Cattle Breeding Federation's (ICBF’s) Herd Plus. This will reduce the need for dual data entry.

"It’s brilliant now that CowControl works with ICBF. It means I don’t have input calving dates twice. It’s far more efficient," Joe said.

"The simplicity and the accuracy of the system is the beauty of it. If CowControl and Alfco were taken away from us in the morning, they’d be sorely missed."

For more information on Censortec CowControl, click here.