Dairy Farmers - Why Use the TSi?

As a dairy farmer, you know that the live weight and animal condition is crucial to the breeding performance of your herd. Heifers must reach target weights before the animals can reliably get in calf; cows’ successful conception rates also rely on the quality of their condition. Using a TSi for regular weighing and treatment recording provides the ideal tool to achieve good decision-making and avoid costly mistakes when managing replacements and other dry stock.*   
 

Key Benefits of a TSi for a Dairy Farmer

• The TSi system weighs quickly and accurately, producing simple weight reporting.
• Regularly using the TSi system to weigh your animals will help you monitor progress more effectively (heifers’ percentage of mature live weight at 6 months old should be 30%; at 15 months, 60% (mating); and at 22 months, 90%).
• Easily export liveweight history to LIC's 'MINDA'.
• Regular weighing using a TSi can tell you accurately whether your feed regime is working or not.
• Record treatments and other events, enabling you to correlate future performance with animal history.
• Keep track of animal numbers and growth rate progress by mobs, stock class or breed.
• The TSi system increases your profits through accurate measurement in a number of ways:
  • Helps to reduce the consequences of delayed growth and puberty (and thus delayed pregnancy), leading to less chance of severe financial impact in a seasonal meat or milk production system. (For more information, see Dairy NZ ‘s website for a copy of Dairy NZ’s “The In Calf book”).
  • Ensures liveweight gains are meeting targets.
  • Enables cattle earmarked for sale to be unloaded at the best time for maximum profit.

See dairy heifers being weighed using the TSi in action.

Other ways to use your TSi on-farm

While the TSi is ideal for livestock-related on-farm use - it doesn't stop there. The TSi has the versatility and capability to be a farm-wide management tool, which you can use to keep track of a wide variety of activities and items on your farm. For example, you can track your paddock and crop management activities or store farm vehicle details and service records . Find out more about how the TSi's flexible recording system can be applied to general farming uses.

Ben Gordon , dairy support unit for Wairarapa Moana Incorporated, Mangakino, New Zealand

Ben and his team at the ‘Sheep and Beef Unit’ provide dairy support on a 1100 hectare property at Mangakino, north of Taupo. Part of Wairarapa Moana Incorporated’s 5000 hectare/9000 dairy cow operation, the dairy support unit raises dairy calves through various stages until they are mated heifers ready to go back onto the dairy farms. Ben’s been using the TSi system since mid-November 2010.

“One of the key things about using the TSi and the EID reader is how it relates to our ability to achieve our targets. It helps us with our main focus of meeting livestock objectives and targets with those young dairy animals. It just gives us the ability to monitor them easily and accurately so there are no surprises.”

“The TSi does exactly what we want it to do and it gives us exactly what we want. We can check whether our systems are robust and if not, ask why and fix them immediately. We’re paid to do a job – and the best way for us to do that job is for us to accurately know what to predict and what to plan accordingly.”

The ease of use, accuracy and speed of the TSi system has won over Ben and his team. “It’s just an effective management tool!” Read more  

*(For the milking herd, collect daily liveweights using a fully automatic walk over Gallagher DairyScale)