Hello I’m Bruce Reynolds from Reynolds Communication, the following Podcast is an initiative of
the NSW Department of Primary Industry’s Dairy Group.
I’m talking today with Trevor Mills a dairy farmer from Drouin South in Victoria about
the adoption of automatic milking systems on his dairy farm.
Trevor, tell us a little bit about your operation.
We run a family operation here with my wife and two younger children, we have a 122 hectare
property, no irrigation or anything like that, just natural rainfall.
We mostly run a split calving system of approximately 30 per cent autumn calvers, 70 per cent spring
calvers.
In the past we’ve also run a lot of dairy export heifers.
We’ve just got out of that in probably the last 12 months or so because the export business
fell in a bit of a heap there for a while.
But last year we peaked at 175 cows, which is probably a few more than what we’ve been
milking through the traditional dairy for the last few years.
This year we might happen to push up to about 200, we’ll wait and see what the season
does and what price the cattle are because we buy in all our replacements here, don’t
rear any replacements on the farm at all, just buy in heifers on the point of calving.
As a result of that we run a mixed herd, a mixture of Fresian and Fresian jersey cross
cattle.
With your automatic milking system, tell us the story about how you became involved, how
long ago and what you’ve actually introduced.
We’ve been up and running for about 15 months now, we went with the GEA Westfalia MI1 robot
which has been used quite extensively overseas for a few years now but this was the first
installation in Australia.
So we were guinea pigs in regards to that.
Why did we go down the AMS path?
Basically the dairy we were milking in was a 15 unit herringbone, swing over herringbone,
it was a shed that was 50 years old and had been updated about three or four times in
that period of time and it had really reached the end of its useful life.
Apart from that it was getting too hard for me to milk the cows in that shed as I was
getting older it was just the workload and the stress was taking too much of a toll on
my health so we just had to make the decision of you know whether we get out of dairying
or do we go down this AMS path.
You’ve gone down the AMS path, how many boxes do you operate, and I think you mentioned
just under 200 cows?
Yes we peaked at 175 cows last year, we’ve got three boxes in the system.
We’re unique in that there is only one robot arm that operates the entire three boxes.
It’s a travelling arm which can work on up to five boxes if you wish to go to that
size.
So why did you go to the single arm rather than having an arm for each box?
How do I explain it?
You’re able to set up this robot system a little bit like a herringbone setup, in
that I could have my cows in the boxes and I was on the other side, and I could see everything
that was going on.
So you have easy access to the cows, you had easy access to the robot and the workings
of the boxes and everything.
Cost wise I felt it was an efficient way to go and you’re only having to buy one robot
arm and if we ever wanted to expand in the future by adding two boxes that’s all I
had to buy, was just the two boxes but no additional arm.
From a milking point of view though, are you able to do it reasonably efficiently with
only the one arm but three boxes?
Oh yes, yes a lot of the time the arm’s just sitting there doing nothing because there’s
three cows cupped up and being milked so there’s no worries at all.
Throughput with the robot varies with the time of year, the amount of milk that the
cows are producing, but 60 cows per day per box is pretty reasonable to achieve.
From a benefit point of view, what have you noticed in moving across those 15 months ago
to an AMS system from your traditional herringbone system?
For a start it was quite a challenge to move across from conventional milking to the robot,
there’s an awful lot to learn.
Obviously we had to train the cows to go through all the automatic gates and the robots and
everything like that.
That probably took I suppose about three months to get the cows to go through reasonably smoothly.
We only started off with a small number of cows, about 50 in the beginning, but as the
months went by and particularly after now 12 or 15 months in operation everything’s
running smoothly and its revolutionised the amount of time we have.
Changed the way that our time is being used during the day, for example I can do a little
bit of fencing of late and I’ve been able to be up the paddock at five o’clock of
the evening doing fencing, not having to worry about racing back to milk cows.
And this evening my son has to go round to footy training so I’ll be able to take him
around to that so it’s a way, way better system for milking cows.
How have you found from a feed management point of view to make sure the cows move through
the milking system and into the next paddock?
It hasn’t been that difficult.
I think one of the things you probably need to make sure of is you have a farm that is
reasonably set up, set up reasonably well with paddock layout, good lane ways and suck.
Changes throughout the year cow traffic, depending on the weather, if the weather’s good the
cows tend to traffic a lot better, and if the weather is cold and wet well they don’t
traffic so well.
But generally I don’t have too many issues.
In the last couple of months the cows have been coming in in the middle of the night
and milking and I get up at 7:30 in the morning and they’re all milked and all gone down
to the next paddock.
It varies you know, once you’ve got the herd trained they generally traffic without
too much trouble.
What about the introduction of your new heifers as they calve and come into production, as
you said you bring new stock on all the time, how difficult and how much of a challenge
is it to train those young cows through the system?
It’s not much of a challenge if you go about it in the right way.
It’s probably best if you can to put the heifers through the boxes before they calve,
even if it’s only for three or four days, just so that when they do calve and come into
be milked for the first time they’re not scared of the boxes, trying to escape and
this type of thing.
Generally heifers or any new animal you bring into the system settle down within probably
four to five days, there’s some that can take a little bit longer, maybe a couple of
weeks but it’s no harder training the new cows or heifers to come into the AMS system
than what it is for a traditional dairy.
If anything I think it might be a little bit easier in some respects.
What about from a maintenance and operation point of view, do you have to have a lot of
extra skills that you wouldn’t have had in the past to deal with this new technology
and the robotic system?
You have to be reasonably computer literate.
There is a lot of reports from the software that you can generate, it takes a while to
learn how to generate those reports and how to understand them correctly.
You don’t want to be afraid using a computer at all.
You want to be prepared to watch others and learn from them.
It’s just something that takes time, it’s a bit like being put into the cockpit of an
aircraft for a start and being given a user manual and say here fly it.
So it does take a while, you make some mistakes along the way but if you just take your time
and don’t expect too much in the beginning you’ll get there eventually.
One common discussion point with the systems though is that you seem to get inconvenient
alarms throughout the night and early morning, have you encountered that and how have you
been able to overcome it and manage it?
In the beginning I had quite a few alarms which were annoying.
In the middle of the night there’s nothing worse than being woken up from a deep sleep
at one o’clock in the morning and having to go up and view a problem with the robot.
As time’s gone by I’ve ironed out most of the issues that we had and I rarely get
an alarm now.
Maybe every couple of months, and generally I can deal with it from my mobile phone, often
it’s just a simple little problem where the cow hasn’t walked out of the box quick
enough and the gate can’t close.
If it’s a serious problem and I haven’t got time to go up and check what’s going
on, well it’s just a simple matter of shutting down one box and allowing the other boxes
to continue on until I can get up there.
But more often or not I can deal with the problem on my mobile phone and just reset
the box and away it will go again.
In the early days, yes, there were certainly a lot of alarms going off then and quite a
few visits to the robot in the middle of the night, but now I’m familiar with the system
and the cows are familiar with the system we rarely get a serious alarm these days.
Could you outline now what a typical day is now in the running of your dairy?
Well basically now, at the moment, I get up at about 7:30 in the morning, wander up to
the dairy to just check that everything’s going OK up there, do a bit of a clean up,
change milk filters, just hose out the boxes and maybe the yard.
That probably takes me 15 minutes or so, check a few reports while I’m there as well.
Make sure there are no new cows with mastitis or anything like that.
Hop on the motorbike and go down to the paddock, if there are any stragglers down the paddock
I’ll just hunt them out and they can start walking up the laneway and while they’re
doing that I’ll shift electric fences, go down check on the dry cows and come back to
the dairy and make sure the cows that haven’t been milked are in the yard.
That’s really about it for the morning.
During the day I just get on with normal tasks that need to be around the farm.
Evening, generally around four o’clock in the evening, I once again just go up to the
dairy and just check on everything up there.
Do a bit more cleaning up and go and collect anymore straggly cows again and shift electric
fences.
So in the morning it just depends how quick I want to be, but if I’m in a hurry I can
probably do everything within half an hour, if I just dawdle along it takes me about an
hour.
Similar at night time too.
Often you just sit up there in the office looking at a few reports or just watching
the cows being milked so that’s the beauty of the system, there’s no real pressure
or stress most of the time you can sit back and enjoy the cows being milked.
You outlined the benefit there of a lot more time to yourself and a lot more time to do
other things, and you’ve had the opportunity to operate a traditional herringbone system
and now you’ve moved to an AMS system, so would you go back to a traditional herringbone
system or are you happy with what you’ve now got?
There’s absolutely no way known I’d go back to herringbone or any other type of milking
shed.
Once you go through the first 12 months with an AMS it’s just heaven compared to the
old way of milking cows.
I shouldn’t say all of the stress, but a lot of the stress has gone, and a lot of that
tiredness has gone.
Previously milking in the old herringbone you were working on exhaustion, on adrenaline
all the time.
Now it’s a lot more laid back, a lot easier.
What about from an output point of view, what have you noted with cows output compared to
before you introduced the AMS system?
I have to admit the first 12 months was a challenge.
During the springtime last year our milk production was probably similar to what it would have
been in the herringbone.
Once we hit the summer period and growth rates in the paddocks started to slow down during
the summer period I ran into a few issues there because I’ve never made any silage
or anything on this place for years, but I’ve come to realise that perhaps we do need to
make silage in the future to feed those cows during the summer period.
The main issue was the first part of the herd was getting down to the paddock and eating
all the grass that was there available and the last cows that got down there were getting
nothing so they ended up tending to dry themselves off.
So there was a big learning experience there, but I can see my way past that this year and
already for the last few months our milk production has probably been close to double what it
was for the last year so I don’t have any worries about milk production in the future.
There was a lot to learn in the first 12 months but I can see a way forward from here and
I think our milk production can end up being a lot better than what it was in a conventional
dairy.
For someone listening to this conversation and thinking about whether they should or
shouldn’t go into an AMS system, what would you say to those people?
You need to put a lot of thought into it.
First off I would suggest people need to have a good look at farm layout because I know
for some AMS farmers cow traffic is not too good and I suspect part of the reason is because
the layout of farm and maybe gateways to and from paddocks are maybe located in the wrong
position, maybe their laneways aren’t up to scratch, maybe the gateways are just bogey
or they may have bogey sections on their laneways.
You have to make everything right so the cow’s happy to walk to and from the dairy.
Get serious about putting a robot in.
I’d suggest you don’t try and adapt old dairies unless you have a really big shed
that gives you plenty of space to work with.
It would be much better for most people to go onto a new greenfields site.
New way of dairying AMS so I think it’s probably best to start from scratch and plan
it right from the beginning.
You need to think about future expansion, that is probably one of the problems with
AMS, especially if you are borrowing money you have to be careful, I would suggest to
people that if they are looking to borrow a lot of money to put in AMS, for the simple
reason there are very well defined limits on how many cows they can milk per day.
Unlike a rotary or herringbone if you wish to milk more cows because you wish to work
longer hours well you can.
With an AMS that’s not possible.
So there is quite a bit to think about.
Keep an open mind.
AMS milking is totally different to conventional milking, as I’ve said frequently in the
past I think you need to throw out the rule book once you go into AMS and you need to
treat it as if you’ve never milked cows before.
Just keep a total open mind to how you are going to do things.
There’s a lot of talk about frequency of milking with the AMS system, I say don’t
get too hung up about that, I think that is overrated.
Provided your cows are coming in and getting milked around about two times a day that’s
fine, don’t worry too much about getting them up to about two and half to three times
a day, that may come later but in the start I don’t think that’s too important.
There’s a lot to think about, do your research, talk to other farmers and it does work the
system.
There’s lots of different brands of robots out there, they all work, they all have their
good and their bad points, it’s just a matter of deciding which is the best for you.
Trevor Mills from Drouin South in Victoria thanks for talking to us today about your
automatic milking system.
My pleasure Bruce.
I hope a lot of people can learn something from these podcasts.
For this Podcast and many more podcasts, fact sheets and videos I encourage you to visit
the dairy section within the NSW Department of Primary Industry’s website.