Why AMTS?

I started doing on farm dairy nutrition in 2003. I left a feed company and became independent in 2009. Once I started working on my own, I got a quick education about ration software.

In 2010, I heard about a company called Agriculture Modeling and Training Systems (AMTS), and decided to try out their software.

What an eye opener!

The software was fast, I could actually talk to support people that understood cows, and they could tell me exactly what each nutrient spec meant.

I'm pretty sure Lynn got tired of me calling all the time. She finally sent me a 150 slide power point that went into great detail about how the CNCPS model worked. I can unequivocally say that if I had not started using ATMS, I would not be doing Dairy Nutrition today.

Once I was using ration software that actually performed, I started looking for ways to see if my feed changes actually worked. This seems like a simple question to answer but really, it's not.

In my mind, Income Over Feed Cost is the gold standard for determining if a change worked. But there are a lot of moving parts in that equation

I gathered this data manually for awhile, but I ended up spending so much time gathering data that I had no energy left to interpret what was happening. And that right there is the problem Dairy Margin Tracker was designed to solve.

Dairy Margin Tracker automatically gathers and integrates data from existing software platforms onto a web-based platform that you can view at any time. No more hours spent entering data into spreadsheets and hoping that cells did not get changed.

What does the integration with AMTS do?

Right now, for farms using The Feed Tool, you can link from the recipe tab in ATMS to the recipe in The Feed Tool.

What this means is as soon as your ration is done, you can go directly into The Feed Tool and make the changes. No more making and distributing feed sheets. When the feeder accesses The Feed Tool to make his feed sheet, your changes are already there.

To access The Feed Tool from AMTS' recipe tab simple choose Dairy Margin Tracker Tool Access from recipe tools

And link directly to Dairy Margin Tracker's Feed Tool
I would like to point out a key feature in The Feed Tool - Note the bottom red arrow. You can target the ration dry matter percentage that you want, and The Feed Tool will update your feed sheet with the appropriate amount of water. This is updated anytime forage dry matter or rations are changed.

The next step is to click the edit button (the top red arrow)

At this point you have your AMTS ration on the left side of the page, and your Feed Tool Ration on the Right. Make the necessary changes and you are done.

Additional Features

But there is more - For farms using The Feed Tool you will now have actual DMI for all pens, along with purchased and homegrown feed costs. Additionally, you will be able track inventory usage.

There is one more feature we offer AMTS users that I would like to point out. As I'm sure you know, keeping your cow pages up to date is a chore. Somehow you need to access the farms Herd Management software to get this data. Maybe you can Team View in, maybe you get a back up from the farm, or maybe you just skip it all together.

With Dairy Margin Tracker's Tracker Tool we pull a daily report into our data base. What that means is whenever you need to update you cow page all you do is access our Herd Report and everything you need is in one simple report. Check out this example.