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August 11, 2025
SHAWANO – “A big win for dairy farmers” – that’s what Tara Bohnert, a performance specialist at CowManager, said the company’s ear sensor is.
Bohnert said “it’s a piece of technology that’s working 24/7, 365,” allowing farmers to track the health of their herd through their smartphones.
According to the company’s website (cowmanager.com), the sensor measures ear temperature, eating, rumination and activity.
After about one week of a cow wearing the ear sensor, Bohnert said the system learns the animal and how to detect what’s normal or abnormal behavior.
She said it’s a cloud-based program, and farmers can choose which data to subscribe to.
Per the website, there are a variety of different breakdown modules, including:
Health
The health module, Bohnert said, measures a cow’s eating, rumination and changes in behavior.
“It’s our ability to know a cow is sick before it lets you know it’s sick,” she said.
Transition monitor
Bohnert said the transition monitor identifies cows at risk up to 50 days before calving.
Per the website, 75% of all adult cow disease events occur in the first 30 days after calving.
The monitor, Bohnert said, allows farmers to see subtle changes in behavior, such as eating patterns, so they can take preventative measures.
Fertility
With this module, Bohnert said farmers can identify when a cow is in heat and potentially maximize pregnancy rates.
Nutrition
The nutrition monitor, per the website, sends alerts for heat stress, group health issues, group stress and low feed intake.
Youngstock
Launching at the end of last year, CowManager representatives said this monitor notifies producers when a calf may be falling behind its herd mates.
Bohnert said one farmer – Laura Raatz, a fifth-generation co-owner and herd manager at Wagner Farms in Oconto Falls – said the youngstock monitor has been a game-changer.
“By pinpointing and finding those calves that are not feeling well sooner, we’re able to get them feeling better faster, before they become truly sick or chronic,” Raatz said.
Why Wisconsin?
According to the website, CowManager got its start in 1984 after four generations of farming.
Company founders, the website further states, believed a successful farmer was a prepared farmer, which prompted the invention of the ear sensor.
CowManager and its U.S presence, the website notes, started in 2004, after Dutchman Gerald Griffioen visited a dairy farm in Wisconsin.
Since, Bohnert said the company has continued to grow and revolutionize cow-monitoring systems – becoming a leader in the industry.
According to a timeline Vice President of Sales and Services Jared Krull shared with The Business News, a “development cow-monitoring system” was used at a test farm in 2008 in the Netherlands.
Four years later, in 2012, he said, came the first ear sensor, measuring ear temperature and behavior.
The timeline further shows that 2013 was the introduction of the mobile app.
The first orange sensor combined with RFID (radio-frequency identification) and blank tags, per Krull’s timeline, came in 2014.
As one of the CowManager’s four offices around the world – others being in the Netherlands, Germany and soon, New Zealand – Krull said the Shawano location was established nearly 11 years ago, and is the company’s only presence in the U.S.
“Wisconsin is America’s dairyland,” Bohnert said.
With some employees, like Krull, for example, already located in the Shawano area, she said “it made sense to build a team locally.”
Bohnert said she knew a lot about the program before she ever started working for the CowManager because her family started using the company at their Illinois farm 10 years ago.
She said they track when their cows are in heat so they can breed them at the right time.
Getting this information from the ear sensor, Bohnert said, allows farmers to focus on other tasks, as opposed to someone needing to sit in the barn and monitor the cows.
Krull said the cost of implementing CowManager monitors depends on several factors, including herd size and the data a farmer may want.
A ballpark range, he said, would be seven cents per head per day.
When asked how many farmers use CowManager ear sensors, Krull said they don’t share that information – however, the technology is available in more than 40 countries.
‘Easy to manage, easy to use’
Bohnert said thousands of farmers across the globe have 24/7 control over their herd thanks to CowManager’s monitoring service – including several in Wisconsin.
Herdsman Paul Poppy from Larsen Acres Dairy in Southern Wisconsin, Bohnert said, shared with CowManager that the monitoring system has saved him and his team time and effort.
“We’re not walking around all the pens looking for a sick cow, wasting our time,” Poppy said. “The app gives us an alert, so we know: ‘Hey, we’ve got to go to pen 21, there’s a cow that’s not feeling good, her activity is low. We need to check her out.’ It makes us herdsmen more efficient.”
A farmer in Greenleaf – Jeremy Natzke, co-owner of Wayside Dairy – shared with the CowManager team that he saw “immediate value” with the monitoring system since installing it in 2020.
“The return on investment is really very quick…,” Natzke said. “The health module has helped us become more profitable by finding those sicker cows quicker. And, because we find them quicker, they get back on their feet a lot quicker, too. This leads to more profit, because we are helping the cows feel better sooner.”
At Hedrich Rivers Bend Dairy in Hilbert, Herd Manager Jenna Hedrich shared with CowManager that the ear sensors enable remote monitoring, therefore reducing labor.
“CowManager has helped us with a lot of labor,” Hedrich said. “Having CowManager on our mobile allows us to monitor the cows, so we have a list to help us know who to go look for. We’re not walking the pens to go search and check every one of these cows. We know who we’re going to check out, when they went off feed, when they lost their activity, that type of thing.”
Herding innovation
Krull said the company is a global leader in cow monitoring systems and continues to grow in footprint and customer base.
In April, he said the company received the Professional Dairy Producers Nexus Award for its innovation with the Sort my Cow Sort Gate System – which, per the CowManager website, is designed to address labor shortages in the industry by boosting overall operational efficiency.
Furthermore, the website states that the Sort my Cow system “seamlessly integrates” with the CowManager ear monitoring system.
“It works by receiving alerts from CowManager ear sensors, allowing you to easily divert cows who signal an alert and need attention,” the website states, “all while maintaining smooth cow flow and minimizing stress and disruption to the rest of the herd.”
Krull said Griffioen is still very active and the company – continuing to develop new things for the benefit of the industry.
