Merck Animal Health is expanding its SenseHub Dairy Youngstock technology to bucket-fed calves, adding another feeding system to the monitoring platform first introduced for bottle-fed calves in 2024.
The expansion uses the same software and ear tags already used with bottle-fed calves. According to Merck, additional testing confirmed the system could monitor calves regardless of whether they receive milk from a bottle or bucket. The technology is designed to identify changes in calf behavior, giving producers and veterinarians another source of information between routine visual observations.
“Whether it’s a bottle or a bucket, it doesn’t matter,” says Dr. Jeremy Schefers, a technical services veterinarian with Merck Animal Health. The system is not focused solely on the few minutes a calf spends drinking milk. Instead, it monitors behavior throughout the day.
Looking for Changes Before They Are Obvious
SenseHub Dairy Youngstock initially focused on identifying calves with scours and pneumonia. As the technology has been used on farms, however, Schefers says its value has extended into other areas of calf health and management.
“What we’re learning is that it finds illness about a day before we can see it,” Schefers says.
The system monitors activity and rumination and flags changes from a calf’s previous behavior. Those changes don’t provide a diagnosis, but they can identify an animal that warrants a closer look.
Activity is particularly useful during the first weeks of life. As calves begin consuming starter feed, rumination becomes another important measure. Schefers looks for both measures to increase as calves mature rather than focusing on a single reading.
“We don’t measure temperature. We don’t think we have to, because their activity drops before the temperature spikes,” Schefers says. “Temperature is generally a lagging indicator. If I wait until a calf gets a temperature, I’m usually a day late. If the activity drops, I need to look now.”
A Calf’s Response to Management
Disease detection is only one application for the behavioral information.
Changes in activity or rumination can also follow management events, including vaccination, changes in feed, weather shifts or weaning. That gives producers another way to evaluate how calves respond to changes in their environment.
“It gives calves a voice,” Schefers says. “If you do something to them and they don’t like it, their activity drops or their rumination drops.”
That information can sometimes point toward a management issue rather than disease.
In one example, Schefers says calves were showing inconsistent rumination patterns. When the calves and their management were examined more closely, the team found they were consuming substantial amounts of grain but drinking relatively little water. The behavioral pattern helped prompt a closer look at what was happening in the pen.
Turning an Alert into a Clinical Assessment
The technology also changes how Schefers approaches calves that appear on the monitoring list.
“When I look at a calf’s data, it’s pattern recognition,” he says. “I want activity to go up, I want rumination to go up.”
Schefers describes moving between the behavioral data and the physical calf, using both to determine what may have changed. The approach relies on the individual calf’s own pattern, with the system’s health index comparing current behavior with recent behavior.
This makes the technology a screening tool rather than a diagnostic endpoint. The system can help identify which calves deserve attention, while the physical examination and clinical context determine what the change means.
From Individual Calves to Herd Trends
The bucket-fed expansion is one of two SenseHub developments announced by Merck. The company also introduced SenseHub Insights, a web-based dashboard designed to move from individual-animal monitoring to herd-level trends.
The dashboard uses existing SenseHub Dairy data to track measures including fresh-cow health and rumination, fresh-cow disease risk, heat stress, milking routine consistency and lock-up time consistency.
The broader opportunity is to use monitoring data at two levels: identifying individual animals that warrant attention while also looking for patterns that may indicate changes in herd management.
Merck is also exploring how youngstock behavioral data could be used over longer periods to better understand calf development and potential relationships with future performance.
As automated monitoring becomes more common, the value may ultimately depend less on the alert itself and more on how that information is incorporated into clinical decision-making. The sensor can identify that something changed. The veterinarian still has to determine what that change means.
