Electronic ear tags that watch cattle day and night are helping small cow-calf operations with too few hands to spot the moments that matter most: when a cow comes into heat, when she calves and when she falls sick, DTN/Progressive Farmer reported in a survey of three systems on the US market.
Iowa producer Justin Robbins and his wife, Lacey, run their herd largely on their own while she holds a full-time job and he also farms. "We needed something to help with time management and efficiency," he said. They bought Merck's SenseHub Cow Calf system at CattleCon 2025 in San Antonio, tagged all their spring-calving cows and set up the antenna at the hoop building where the cows calve and stay until they are artificially inseminated. Robbins said there is a learning curve in understanding the alerts, but "I do believe we got more cows bred this year than in the past because of this technology."
SenseHub uses accelerometers in the tag to detect changes in behaviour and turn them into alerts on estrus, ideal insemination windows, irregular heats, suspected abortion, expected calving dates and, on its premium tag, health outliers. Tags store 24 hours of data and must pass within range of a powered antenna, which reaches up to about a quarter of a mile in front and some 300 feet to the sides, at least twice a day in the breeding season. Merck puts the average cost at $56 per cow per year and expects the batteries to last about five years.
701x's solar-charging xTpro tag needs no antenna: it switches between Bluetooth, cellular signal and satellite, and sends alerts on health, low activity, GPS location, bull mounting, estrus, calving and cows out of the fence. A cheaper xTlite calf tag pairs with the mother's tag, which relays the calf's data. The xTpro costs $100 with a $75-a-year data plan and the xTlite $20.
Ceres Tag describes its solar-powered GEN6 tag as the first direct-to-satellite cattle platform, reporting feed intake on pasture, estrus and calving with no base station. The tags last 36 months from activation and are sold in boxes of 10 at $40 a tag plus a $4.99 monthly subscription per tag; the company says they work on 42 species in 44 countries.
For producers short of labour, the appeal is that the cow's own behaviour does the reporting. All three companies said they would work with producers to fit the system to each operation.
Photo: Cgoodwin / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
Source: DTN / Progressive Farmer
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