Fellside Milk Producers: monitoring, marking and robotic milking

Tuesday 13 December 2011

Twenty two farmers attended the Horse and Groom at Gosforth to hear about monitor farm progress, milkbench opportunities and the robotic milking progress seen since the group took a visit to a group member's farm in July.

Kate Gascoyne spoke first about the Cumbria Dairy Monitor Farm, for which she is coordinator. She explained that the farm at Dacre in the Eden Valley was chosen because it was a typical farm with a series of things to develop, thus a way of helping other dairy farmers to sort out similar issues on their farms.

Farmed by Matt and Sue Bland and family, Hesket Farm is on heavy clay soil, thus making the most of grass is a big issue. They have done grass measuring with a plate-meter this year, splitting fields into paddocks to save grass, which worked well up until the wet spell of weather, when cows had to come inside in September.

Kate explained that reports of meetings about all of the six monitor farms in Cumbria, Lancashire and Cheshire can be followed on the Livestock NW web site.

Many of Hesket Farm’s herd expansion issues were covered at the Dairy Herd Expansion Conference in September. At the start of the project in August 2009 Matt had 160 dairy cows and planned to expand to 300, having invested in a new milking parlour just before this.

The expansion of the herd happened relatively quickly in 2011, the herd now consisting of 285 cows and planning to buy in more in the next six months. Due to the unavailability of young stock housing and the focus being on the milking herd and increasing yield, Matt and Sue decided to sell their young stock and adopt a ‘flying herd’ policy for the next few years.

This has involved working closely with their vet to protect the existing herd against disease and manage the new cows carefully.

At a feed planning meeting last winter, where the visiting farmers were asked to condition score different groups of cows, the cows were felt to be generally at the correct score for stage of lactation, but lame ones were losing condition. So lameness and mobility scoring became one of the things to ‘monitor’ and the herd is scored every quarter.

Matt and his staff hosted a foot-trimming course at the farm, run by Paragon vets and also received advice from a specialist vet as part of the DairyCo Healthy Feet Programme. The farm has also had an animal health plan, a nutrient management plan and a resource management plan, and is also benchmarking with DairyCo through Milkbench.

Kate concluded that the Dairy Monitor Farm project has 15 months left, to monitor production and progress. Much of this will be discussed at the Open Day on Tuesday, February 7^th 2012 where Kate invited those present to come along and find out more.

Tina Swainston from DairyCo continued on the cost efficiency theme, measuring performance against cost efficiency with Milkbench+, a service funded by the milk levy that therefore has no extra cost to the farmer. She added that New Zealand dairy farmers had been benchmarking for 10 years.

The service can be done one to one or as a group, the latter helping farmers compare and see why some costs differ, thus possibly increasing efficiency and profitability.

As Tina explained "If you can’t measure, you can’t manage it", better management leading to higher profits. Figures are confidential, but can be shared with permission. An appointment on farm takes two to four hours, looking at all income and expenses relating to the dairy enterprise (milk, livestock, crop, forage, sales, rents, herd replacement costs, depreciation costs on machinery and buildings and labour costs (full-time, part-time and casual).

Tina concluded that two-day courses (Planning for Profit) are available and that benchmarking can help a farmer make decisions on whether to expand or cutback.

Following the Robotic Milking Demo Event at Springfield Farm, Bigrigg back in July, Rennick Thompson gave the group an update of how the first year had worked out for him.

He reported that both milk prices and production had risen, far better than anticipated. At Present cows are yielding an average of 39kg of milk a day at an average 175 days in their lactation adding up to a farm daily production of over 2,100 litres from 58 cows.

The herd has risen from an 8,000 litre per year average to over 11,000 litres in 305 days of lactation. He had reached the optimum number of cows 58-60 given the yield for the system, thus is now concentrating on efficiency, weeding out those slower at milking or with problematic udder sizes and teat positions.

Although the herd is giving a higher milk production than anticipated, Rennick added that he also had higher input costs; was feeding half a ton of cake each day. Vet and A.I. costs had also increased and a present concern is the problem of getting a select few of the cows back in calf.

Protein and butter fat levels are relatively low although with the higher milk production this is to be expected, Rennick is looking at ways to improve these levels by alteration to feeding and improvements to the herd’s genetics by purchasing good quality cows and a superior breeding programme.

The milk yield has been affected this winter by the slightly wetter silage caused by poor weather therefore a higher protein based blend and brewers grains has been used to mix with the silage.

During the spring and summer the cows have access to the fresh grass in the field as well as the TMR diet in the trough, hence more silage is being fed. However, the system frees up more fields for silage production and less fertilizer is used.

Rennick’s plan for improvement is to keep cows that milk quicker, improve foot health care, to introduce better breeding to raise milk quality and to use sexed semen.

Rennick stated that his choice of milking system was influenced by the lack of good quality labour available in the area and the cost of this labour. The employee would have to be first rate to compare to the standard of milking by the robot.

The robot does not require sick pay/days, holidays etc. It measures cake intake and milk output it also records milk temperature and quality, weight loss, rumination activity, heat time, number of visits per cow and monitors and adds a corrective dose of propylene glycol to the diet if the cow is suffering from slow fever.

However, the downside is that when problems do arise they need manual intervention, for example, mastitis treatment, correction to twisted milk pipes that lead to the teat cup, and bringing in late cows to be milked. Plus the system had been problematic during the frosty weather but adding heaters helped prevent the pipes from freezing up.

Breakdowns, which required external assistance to repair, were attended to within one and a half hours by a Lely engineer, the service contract covered this and also included replacing faulty parts.

An added bonus of the robots computer management program is that all the data can be viewed from home or abroad, this enables Rennick to still be in control of operations when he is having family time.