Moonsyst Ltd. has organised a workshop on 17th January 2017 in Budapest, Hungary with the participation of Dr. Joachim L. Kleen speaking about the latest findings in rumen pH studies. Moonsyst also presented the results of the product validation of their VetAsyst rumen pH monitoring system and attendees have been informed about the results of the first reference works by the farmers already using VetAsyst.

With the VetAsyst rumen pH monitoring system farmers can continously monitor their herd's rumen condition in an animal friendly and automated way to optimize their farm management, feeding and production. Moonsyst has carried out their product validation according to the protocol of the Budapest Veterinary University, taking samples from fistulated cows on a regular basis and crossing these data with the information retrieved from the 2-2 boli placed in the same animals. According to Péter Gesler, Moonsyst CEO, the rumen itself is not a stable environment and the pH meters used during the validation to measure samples have themselves and inherent +-0,05 pH value inaccuracy. Taking into consideration these basic information, the validation results of +-0,2 pH values after 85 days are considered excellent and enable VetAsyst to perform in research and field application as well.

The preliminary validation results of the VetAsyst rumen pH monitoring system

One of the fistulated animals who „worked” on the validation project.

The first industrial users of VetAsyst have also presented the results of their reference works during the workshop. Balázs Venczák from Komárom underlined the sensibility of the system to detect all management issues and to show the impacts of any changes in feeding and recepies. The farm has been able to retreive precious feedback with VetAsyst about their decision to feed yiest during the calving period, that proved to be effective. Komáromi Mg. Zrt. has been the leading farm in terms of milk yields among the farms housing more than 1000 cows during the whole of the year in 2016 in Hungary and is considering continuing the VetAsyst trials with an increased number of boli in 2017 to further improve their performance in management and feeding by using continuous rumen monitoring data.

Dr. Gábor Sályi, the president of the supervisory board of Laktored has supported the opinion of Balázs Venczák and addded that a low sampling rate already allows to make herd level observations. In the case of Laktored, with a farm of 400 heads, 8 boli have proved the usefulness and the simpliity of the system, by carriing the information straight to the mobiles of the users. Dr. Sályi added, that the system itself is usefull, however expert eyes need to be available to make good use of the information provided by VetAsyst.

The workshop's highlight was the speach of Dr. Joachim Kleen, who presented the latest findings in rumen pH monitoring, citing still unpublished materials from German and Danish researchers. According to these the focus is shitfting from absolute pH values to trends and deviations from rumen stability. A German research has demonstrated that among 24 animals with rumen monitor those with stable pH curves had all produced higher milk yields than instable ones.This observation was supported by another study of 26 farms that revealed instable pH is due to management and feeding issues rather than external factors, such as weather conditions or the quality of the feed.

Dr. Kleen, advisor to Moonsyst highlighted that acidosis is the byproduct of inadequate management, rather than feed quality. He also reminded all attendees that the target must be on rumen pH stability rather than absolute or average pH  values, as deviations or extremes always come hand in hand with a drop in production. Continuous pH monitoring can show farmers the instability of the animals' rumen and allows immediate remedies to improve feeding management and farming performance.