How ParlorBoss upped Wisconsin’s largest family-owned dairy farm’s game

The ParlorBoss system offers a trifecta of benefits for Pagel’s Ponderosa: it drives efficiency, boosts cow comfort and improves employee morale, revolutionizing their herd management.

ParlorBoss works alongside DairyComp to streamline important tasks around your rotary parlor, improving compliance, cow comfort and overall efficiency.

Technology and efficiency seem to go hand in hand. This is what Chris Szydel of Kewaunee, Wisconsin says, as he shares how incorporating technology into his role as herd manager has been a game changer that has upped the overall efficiency at Wisconsin’s largest family-owned dairy.

“It is just like a light switch,” he notes, sharing that he first performed his role with a clipboard and reports printed off of DairyComp and manually doing everything.

Szydel joined Pagel’s Ponderosa as a nighttime milking technician in 1995. A decade later, he was promoted to herd manager and now manages both the Pagel Ponderosa and Hilltop Farm dairies, overseeing three different parlors and 65 employees. His role has evolved tenfold.

“We doubled in one year, making for a big learning curve. Essentially, everything that was running so smoothly on a daily basis for 1,000 cows had to be converted to a 3,000-cow dairy with a whole new site and setup and going from one parlor to two parlors,” he says. “It was a big transition with a big learning curve. John Pagel told me, when the potatoes start falling off the plates, you got to put them back carefully.”

A Cadillac System

“My best analogy is going from a horse and buggy to getting into a new Cadillac,” he explains.

The Cadillac systems that Szydel is referring to is ParlorBoss and SenseHub (formerly SCR) working together in their rotary, which allows Szydel and his team to now perform herd management tasks while cows are milking, reducing lockup times.

“We went from 5-6 hours a day on headlock time for the herd to 4 -5 hours per week lock up time,” he says sharing the SenseHub system pulls data from the cows collars, forwards it to DairyComp that then will relay it to the ParlorBoss screen. “All the tasks we need to take care of for the cows show up on the screen. The cows are being taken care of without disrupting them, it is a low stress environment.”

Szydel shares that SenseHub has also significantly helped them reduce antibiotic and hormone cost on the dairies.

“It does a great job of identifying cows early and we can give them attention sooner. With this technology, we can better identify the animals and have the compliance to double check to make sure that the cow got the attention that she needed,” he adds.

Conducting all their vaccinations and hormone medicine on the rotary, Szydel explains if a cow needs more attention, they can use sort gates to separate her for an exam.

“Everybody else can then go from the parlor back to the pen,” he says, explaining even on small breeding days, they can sort off cows into a small pen and breed and not disrupt the whole group of cows. “The cows are more comfortable in the pens after milking. The sort gates also allow us to breed cow 2x a day, separating the ones we need. We can breed the cow within 5 to 10 minutes and then open up the gate and allow her right back into traffic.”

Continue reading about how Pagel’s Ponderosa is a taking a technology-first approach in this Dairy Herd Management article written by Karen Bohnert.