DeLaval Herd Navigator™ firmly established on the market

The 200th commercial installation is now complete after an installation on a farm in Soignies, Belgium in March 2015.

“We see this as a sign that DeLaval Herd Navigator™ has established itself on the market,” says Cecilia Bågenvik, Business manager, On Farm Milk Analysis at DeLaval. “The 200 installations have been sold worldwide and we see there is a growing demand now that the solution is in place and there are so many strong reference cases.”  DeLaval Herd Navigator™ has now been sold in 18 countries worldwide.

The first commercial installation was sold in the Netherlands in August 2009 and from there it took close to four years to reach the first 100 farms, but only eighteen months to reach DeLaval Herd Navigator™ farm number 200.

“Every day we monitor the technical performance of all the DeLaval Herd Navigator™ farms around the world, and we have put a lot of efforts into improving and fine tuning the system over the past five years,” says Bågenvik.

“We now have a very stable and high-performance system. I believe that, together with the fact that the DeLaval Herd Navigator™ system is becoming available in more and more countries are the main factors that we see an acceleration in sales starting to happen.”

Early-warning system for dairy farms

DeLaval Herd Navigator™ is an animal-health tool. It has been designed to detect the dairy cows in any size of herd that require attention. What’s more, it actively recommends which course of action should be taken. Milk samples are taken via a sampler built into the milking system, which can be conventional or automatic. A series of valves and chambers pump the milk away from the cow to the small on-site laboratory for analysis and then returns it to the yield. All parts are then automatically cleaned and readied for the next cow.

Better detection means less risk

Keeping cows healthy and successfully managing reproduction are the motors driving modern dairy businesses. Preventing diseases such as mastitis and ketosis actively reduces the amount of antibiotics used in milk production, which is beneficial for the entire value chain. DeLaval Herd Navigator™ measures the gold standard parameter for heat detection and also finds cows in heat that do not show any physical signs.