Wim Kwanten and his brother run a dairy farm with 400 cows in Pelt, Belgium. Since autumn 2024, the farm has been using smaXtec and has made significant progress in health management.
“Could we manage without smaXtec? No, that’s no longer an option,” Wim Kwanten says with a laugh. The brothers were looking for a way to work more efficiently and to monitor the health parameters of their herd more effectively. “We found that with smaXtec. Since we started using the system, both animal health and reproduction have improved significantly.”
Staying one step ahead of pneumonia
Wim and his brother know that health management forms the foundation of their farm. “With smaXtec, we have found a system that supports us in monitoring and improving this,” Wim explains.
smaXtec continuously measures the internal body temperature of cows with an accuracy of ±0.01°C and sends the earliest possible suspected disease indication message at the first immune response. “We were already familiar with pneumonia and were fairly proactive, but we still missed animals or were too late to treat them. Internal body temperature is the first parameter to change, even before symptoms become visible. smaXtec allows us to detect health deviations at the very smallest change in internal body temperature and treat them immediately.”
Pain relief instead of antibiotics
Antibiotic use has also decreased thanks to smaXtec. “Transition diseases that we detect earlier with smaXtec include milk fever and (subclinical) ketosis. Cows that show a lower internal body temperature one to two days before calving are more likely to develop milk fever. We can now see this in advance, so we administer a calcium bolus or infusion.”
Cows with a lower internal body temperature before calving also have a higher risk of developing ketosis around days 20 to 25 of lactation. “smaXtec detects ketosis in the dry period, instead of us waiting for the milk recording date after calving.”
smaXtec also provides suspected disease indication messages for mastitis. “Sometimes we are up to two days earlier. With pain relief and uddermint, we can prevent cows from actually developing mastitis and needing antibiotics. The veterinarian is needed less often; smaXtec provides us with a system that allows us to monitor cow health ourselves.”
Ideal insemination window for each cow
smaXtec provides an ideal insemination window for each cow individually. “We used to miss heats from time to time. smaXtec detects heat signals far better than we ever could ourselves. The calving interval has decreased significantly, as has the age at first calving of the heifers. Reproduction figures increased sharply; we expect many calves in the upcoming months.”
“We couldn’t do it without smaXtec”
The installation of smaXtec went smoothly, and the smaXtec team is always quick to offer personal advice whenever needed. Wim says: “Getting used to working with the system on a daily basis was a learning process of a few weeks at first: you need to understand how the graphs are built and when to take action after a suspected disease indication message. But after a few weeks it became totally easy, and now we couldn’t do without it.”
smaXtec’s feeding tool monitors rumination at group level and flags deviations, so Wim and his brother don’t need to constantly check the herd themselves. A change in grass silage, for instance, disrupted rumination. ‘The system flagged the same deviation for many cows at once, which immediately told us the ration wasn’t balanced, without us noticing it ourselves.’
smaXtec also detected a drop in water intake. “You can see that drinking behaviour changes as soon as the water troughs are clean. That’s why we now clean them more often, so the cows take in more water.”
Everything is monitored without them having to be on the spot themselves. “The labour saving thanks to smaXtec is half an hour to an hour a day. That mainly comes from the animals we no longer have to check ourselves for health parameters.”
They also save on costs by working more preventively on health and reproduction. “With smaXtec, we found exactly what we were looking for, and we’re not giving that up.”
