Robotic milkers offer high throughput and precision recording

Sunday, November 8, 2015

Automatic milking's original aim was to cut labour costs and improve the lifestyle for those looking after the herd. Maybe even more important now is the precision of large herd management now possible from data collected daily by the robots

by NORMAN DUNN

Gone are the days when robotic milking systems were brought in mainly to give farms more time off from the daily drag of milking. More than anything else, they have turned out as massive management aids. They've introduced a new age of precision: able to monitor and electronically record every aspect of production and husbandry, including cow fertility, feed consumption and health.

It was often said over here that the availability of plentiful cheap labour would stop the advance of automatic milking. Come with me to Saxony in eastern Germany and you'll see positive proof that this is wrong.

There's no shortage of low cost agricultural labour in this area, mostly streaming in from further east in Europe. And the dairy farms are big – in European terms anyway – with 1,000, 2.000, 3,000 and more milking cows. Despite this, farmers putting up new mega dairy barns maintain that cheap labour in the milking shed can turn out to be very expensive indeed in modern management terms.

True, robotic systems mean big bucks in investment. But for this commitment you get, say the Saxon converts, unbeatable consistency of milking routines, absolute precision of electronically controlled feeding and reliable early warning of health problems.  

On the Osterland Agrar farm with its milking herd of 2,500 cows, Lely has delivered 44 Astronaut A4 robots (yes, 44!). This is billed as the largest robot-milked herd in the world so far. It features five barns each with eight robotic milkers, and one with four. Again, the attraction for the management here is the centralized and consistent recording of almost every aspect of milk production. In the same region, a 1,000-cow herd is now milked by a battery of 16 single-box robotic milkers. And down the road a little further, another XXL dairy farm has ordered 21 Lely Astronaut A4 units for its herd.

Not only the single- and multi-box systems are being adopted, though. Managers who want a bigger throughput per hour are finding that big rotary parlours with robotic milking arms also offer a high degree of milking management precision.

There's another reason why these systems attract investor interest in northern Europe: grass-based milk production. Keeping cows outside on pasture through the summer is still seen as important for lower cost production. Not only that, in countries such as Sweden pasturing is mandatory for milking cows during the warm season. This is one reason why the European Union is currently funding research into the best way of marrying robotic milking and grazing systems with its $5.5 million AUTOGRASSMILK project.

However, it's a single-box robotic system that is being featured in trials by the Irish Ministry of Agriculture (Teagasc) at the Moorepark research station. Dr. Bernadette O'Brien runs a 70-head herd through a Fullwood Merlin robotic milking system there. The grazing paddocks are laid out at Moorepark so that the cows can move on to fresh grass several times a day, only by passing through the milking facility. This researcher is the first to admit the system seems expensive – the equivalent of $179,600 for the robotic milking box and a further $126,500 for the redesigned farm building lay-out. O'Brien reckons anyway that really big herds out to grass most of the summer would be better served by more throughput, for instance with robotic rotaries.  

One of the leaders here is DeLaval, having launched its first 24-point robotic rotary at Gamleby in Sweden for a 400-cow herd in 2011. This rotary features five robot arms: two arms cleaning udders, two attaching clusters and one post-dipping. The set-up has since proved itself for milking 90 cows an hour. Dairy managers wanting more throughput than this were streaming onto yet another eastern Germany farm this summer to witness the first commercial demonstration of GEA's Dairy ProQ model, in this case a 40-point rotary. Throughput has been increased here to an incredible 200 cows an hour by fitting a robot arm at every milking point. Each arm handles all steps of the milking routine: udder washing, pre-dip, cluster attachment, removal and post-dip. Automatic cluster backflush takes place after every milking.  

You'll ask GEA in vain for the exact financial investment here. The only answer is that the cost of each milking point robot is "substantially below the price of a single-box robotic milking system." Whatever the price, the interest at this launch demonstrated a sizeable market exists for the robotic approach to high throughput milking and precision recording. BF

Norman Dunn writes about European agriculture from Germany.