One concern that can keep any cattle producer hopping? Cattle health.

Whether preventing the issue before it has a chance to begin or monitoring the health of fed cattle across a larger operation, ensuring cattle are living up to their full potential takes time and resources that can be hard to come by.

In a recent episode of the Angus at Work podcast, Angus Beef Bulletin editor Shauna Hermel sat down with representatives from Norbrook and Merck Animal Health at CattleCon25 hosted in San Antonio, Texas, to discuss precision parasite control and how to more effectively monitor overall herd health using wearable tags. Here’s a glimpse at some of the material they covered.

The good and bad bugs

Insects may sometimes create heartache when it comes to cattle comfort, but controlling those nuisance bugs need not come at the cost of losing beneficial fauna. The key is product selection and application timing according to Eric Moore, director of technical services for Norbrook North America.

With cattle beginning to shed and scratch early in the year, lice quickly become a main suspect in the war against herd discomfort.

“Remember, it’s all about timing. We have to match and control the life cycle of the lice. When you look at this type of year, you have to look at the type of products you use,” suggests Moore, noting that commingling animals can be a main culprit when it comes to the spread of biting insects. “That’s always a key factor in any lice outbreak. But if you look at why we [treat cattle], there’s a definite cost to both [quality of] life and hide damage due to scratching and weight loss. You can have a pretty substantial — in today's market — cost with a lice infestation.”

When cattle begin destroying pens, buildings and anything else they’re rubbing on, cattle producers should take note and formulate a treatment plan. Getting ahead of an infestation is paramount to successful control, says Moore.

“We see it happen in the fall as we bring them together. Our temperatures become low, we bring cattle together, we congregate them, and they start spreading lice,” Moore recounts. “It’s no different than head lice in schoolchildren, right?”

But where does the first louse even come from? They’re always present, says Moore, but the interaction of livestock with wildlife leads to further exposure. To increase cattle comfort, there are different types of products that producers can deploy to help control lice. Understanding those products is key to proper control.

Whether producers plan to use an ivermectin pour-on such as Noromectin^®, a topical treatment or an internal product like injectable Noromectin, treatment timing and reducing commingling are nonnegotiables.

“When you do pour them, make sure you apply [product] correctly. Just that one squirt down the back — because it has to be a topical application — doesn’t get the [product] from the withers to the tailhead,” stresses Moore. “Those are things that we really look at and think about when we talk about lice control. But the main one that we see is people not staggering their lice treatments and infecting their counterparts as they commingle cattle together. It’s really about knocking that population down and making sure you don’t have an issue in the future.”

Whether cutting the negative effect of flies on the herd, controlling gastrointestinal parasites or preserving beneficial insects such as dung beetles, there is no reason to take these management decisions on alone.

“Work with your local veterinarian. Work with your local range scientists. Work with local teams you have that understand the environment [you’re existing within]. But also ask yourself, ‘Are there any unintended consequences of what I’m doing?’ and ‘Is what we’re doing the most beneficial thing we can be doing for our cattle and for our customer?’”

Other battles producers commonly fight when it comes to herd nuisances? Flies and worms. While the products and application timing might be different, these pests are no less important to cattle comfort. For more information on insect and parasite control options from Norbrook, please visit www.norbrook.com.

Capitalizing on technology

As technology within the cattle industry continues to advance, the opportunity to capitalize on artificial intelligence for the benefit of cattle management increases. SenseHub^® Feedlot is a wearable device in the form of a cattle tag designed to provide 24/7 monitoring assistance to feedlot managers and staff.

Operating essentially as a bovine-sized Fitbit, SenseHub Feeedlot collects biometric data, distills the information down and provides a pull list of animals needing additional attention to feedlot staff each day. While the system isn’t intended to replace pen riders, it has the potential to make the day of these critical team members a little bit easier via the implementation of a blinking light on each animal experiencing concerning vitals.

“We are collecting both activity and body temperature from [each] animal all day, every day, multiple times a day. That information then is sent to our cloud platform where we utilize different forms of artificial intelligence methods to analyze that information,” explains Jason Nickell, director of insights and outcomes for Merck Animal Health. “Basically, we’re looking for animals that are outliers. Outliers from not only their own data, but also from the group that they’re a part of. When those outliers are identified, the user is notified once a day through an email. They receive a pull list that tells them the identification number of that animal or animals that have been alerted and the pen that they’re in. Then the tag itself illuminates and blinks for several hours to help them identify that animal.”

Producers understand that cattle, as a species, have a herd mentality. Each animal in a group or pen is really not independent of the others. Rather, their dynamics are dictated by the group. When it comes to illness, being a prey animal means cattle hide how they’re really feeling. While cattle may be able to hide their condition from those making a visual inspection for a short period of time, the biometric data collected by the SenseHub Feedlot tags peel away any doubt and provide clarity for the individuals needing additional treatment.

This additional insight into cattle health is invaluable to those working within feedlots to maintain animal health and increase animal husbandry.

“Through [the SenseHub Feedlot] system, we pull those animals and everything is treated or not treated based on our criteria. [That data] is then plugged back into the SenseHub system [to log] treatments,” explains Ross Havens, marketing director, Nichols Farms. “Here in the next few months, as soon as all the animals are off test and through with all their measurements, we’ll send all that data back to Jason [Nickell]. We’ll be going on our third year of benchmarking that data and looking at it.”

In addition to accessing another level of data for their fed cattle, SenseHub Feedlot assists feedlot staff by consolidating labor. Those team members assigned to check pens receive a pull sheet and ride out in the pen instead of having to go in and search for potential sick cattle.

“We kept phenotypes visually for several years and we know we missed some [cattle]. We don’t miss them now,” Havens says, referring to using the SenseHub system. “It works so well that I have a gentleman who has been at the farm for 43 years. He still likes a pencil and a paper, but — Jason can attest to this — we have a meeting with him every year, and Bart says this thing works.”

More information on SenseHub Feedlot is available online.

The information above is summarized from the April 30, 2025, episode of Angus at Work. To access the full episode, including more information on advancements in cattle health management, check out our Angus at Work archive.

Angus Beef Bulletin EXTRA, Vol. 17, No. 6-A