"I would rather have a false alert than no alert at all": Normandie Breeding, after belts and magnets
Updated: Sep 2
Guillaume Vitse founded Normandie Breeding with his wife Camille in 2018. Around fifteen broodmares, around fifteen foalings a year, 35 hectares. What he calls a boutique operation. Here is his testimonial, in his own words. He speaks French, with French subtitles on screen, and the written translation follows below.
It is a family operation, nothing overloaded, not too many horses.
We asked him what problem led him to look for something like this. His answer starts by contradicting us, which is exactly why we keep it as it is.
It is not a problem, it is just innovation, it is progress.
Belts first, then magnets
Before us, he went through the two pieces of kit everyone knows.
Before, we had belts. They were fine, but with the maidens who tend to spend a lot of time lying down, we were getting up regularly at night. So it was a bit of a constraint, because afterwards you have to get back to sleep, and there are the days to get through.
Then we had the magnets. Magnets take time, repositioning the magnet, running a new wire, small constraints.
Two things come out of those two sentences, and they are exactly the two costs that any device fitted to the mare charges you every day: the nights you get up for a maiden who is asleep, and the maintenance time that appears on no invoice.
What changed: you wait for the phone to ring
We do not have to worry about anything any more. We bring them into the box and we forget, we forget that the mares are ready to foal, we wait for it to ring.
We do not have our eyes glued to the screen any more.
That is the most useful line in the whole interview, because it says what we sell and what we do not. Nobody sits in front of a screen. The model measures the behaviour of the horse in the box, recognises behaviour that is not normal, and it calls.
The mare in the next box
We asked him for a concrete example. He tells the story of an alert he first took for a false alarm.
This year we had a mare who was ready to foal. NOVOSTABLE called me, so I went down, I looked at the mare, she was not foaling. I thought, it happens, alerts like that for nothing. But as I always say, I would rather have bad alerts for nothing than no alert for something. And in the end it was another mare, who was not necessarily ready, foaling in the box next door. That really impressed me.
No device fitted to a mare can do that. A belt, a magnet or a tail sensor only speaks about the mare it is attached to, and only once the foaling is already under way. Here, the mare foaling was not the one anyone was watching. She was next door.
NOVOSTABLE in three words
We always end with the same question. His three words: perfect, peace of mind, spot on.
What it looks like elsewhere
Several thousand broodmares went through this season with us, on three continents. What we do across a whole season, before, during and after the foaling, is explained here. And the Haras de l'Aumonerie story, with a foal whose head was turned back, is here.
And to see what it would do on your own boxes: request a demo.
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