Brownie was our first Murray Grey cow. Here she is with her newborn white calf out in the grass.
We lost Brownie suddenly. It's discouraging to have livestock die, but on a real farm that happens, and a friend of mine once advised me with a saying his father taught him: as long as you have livestock, you will have dead stock.
The Nofence collar app showed that Brownie's activity had stopped. In the past a collar has fallen off a cow and we've found it on the ground, but this time the collar reported a drop in activity. We checked the activity chart, and it wasn't just low. It was non-existent. It just stopped on the chart, suddenly. The app reported that drop-off early in the morning, around 3 or 4 AM. A few hours later, once it was daylight, I walked out to the field and saw a black shape lying there. We had been down in the field working with the cows the night before, and we saw her, and she seemed fine. That makes us feel a little better, that the last time we saw her, she was fine. She was normal right up to that point and just fell over and died.
She is part of our herd's story.
The collar didn't just track her — it was the first to know something was wrong. We use Nofence collars on the farm to manage the herd, and they've been a real help.
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