Merck expands SenseHub Dairy to include calf monitoring and herd insights, promising early issue detection and cost savings

London: Merck Animal Health has extended its SenseHub Dairy platform to monitor bucket-fed calves and introduced a herd-level dashboard, enhancing early problem detection and management efficiency. The updates aim to reduce calf mortality, labour, and replacement costs across dairy operations.

Merck Animal Health has widened its SenseHub Dairy monitoring platform with a version that can track bucket-fed calves, extending automated oversight to more youngstock systems. It has also added a herd-level dashboard that turns existing monitoring data into management signals, a move that could help dairies spot problems earlier and reduce the labour needed for retrospective analysis. For producers, the significance lies in linking calf survival, replacement economics and herd performance inside one commercial toolset.

The company, known as MSD Animal Health outside the US and Canada, said SenseHub Dairy Youngstock now works across bottle-fed and bucket-fed calves without any software update or activation step. Merck said the system uses the same ear tags, software and LED alerts already deployed for bottle-fed animals, and is designed to provide 24/7 monitoring from birth through the first year.

The expansion matters because calf losses are expensive. Merck cited a study in which monitored calves recorded a 63% fall in mortality versus visually managed animals, alongside labour savings of 56 minutes a day for 140 calves and about $6,000 in replacement-cost savings per 100 calves at March 2026 heifer prices.

The new SenseHub Insights dashboard, which is available at no extra cost, tracks fresh-cow health, rumination, disease risk, heat stress and consistency in milking and lock-up routines. Merck says the aim is to help owners, managers and advisers act on trends before they become costly.