Hello everyone. Welcome to the first Global AMS R&D Online Showcase. It is a great privilege
for me to welcome all of you today. It's good to see so many people interested and registered.
We've got 153 people registered and there's 30 people on the line at the moment. So thank
you all very much for joining here today.
My name is Nicolas Lyons. I will be your MC today. Just as a bit of a brief background
and introduction, I hold a Bachelor of Ag. Science from the University of Buenos Aires
in Argentina. I've got a PhD in Vet. Science from the University in Sydney in Australia,
and I did my thesis on robotic milking and grazing. I've got almost 15 years and experience
in dairy technology, AMS and research and development. Currently, I'm a development
officer dairy, with the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries and I'm project leader
for Milking Edge.
Milking edge is an Australian AMS Project supported by Dairy Australia, New South Wales
and DPI. Our aim is to support industry to consider, invest, and operate robotic milking
successfully. We do so by generating tools and resources, regional engagement and training.
It is a small team made basically by myself as project leader, Jessica Maloney as project
officer, and [Juan Gargiulo 00:01:35] as post-grad students based at the University of Sydney.
So we rely a lot in collaborations and engagement with industry, not only in Australia but also
overseas.
Why a Global AMS R&D Online Showcase and why did we come up with this idea?
Basically automatic booking systems started in the '70s with the first concepts, the initial
R&D and the first prototypes happened in the '80s, with research and development mainly
in Europe. In 1992, the first commercial farm was installed in the Netherlands and the initial
adoption was mainly smaller farms, often family owned and family operated, systems with high-producing
cows mainly kept indoors and in regions receiving high milk price. But that is very different
to what happens nowadays.
If you look at what happens nowadays, there's currently around 3 million dairy cows milked
with robots in around 25,000 farms that are operating 50,000 robots all around the world.
That is basically 8 million milkings happening every day with robotic milking in the world.
And basically every continent around the globe, every dairy system from pasture-based and
from every scale are operating the technology. So we have systems with very low inputs, for
example, in New Zealand, operating with 300, 400 grammes of concentrate per cow, to systems
in the US or Europe that are completely indoors. And the same with scale. The smallest farm
has one robot milking around 50 to 60 cows, and the largest farm in an indoor system has
currently 67 robots in Chile. That's Ancali and it's making with 67 DeLaval Robots. And
the largest pasture-based system is located in Tasmania. That's Tasmac Farm. That's the
photo on the right-hand side on the left, on the bottom, that is milking with 16 GA
boxes. Again, it's not constrained to smaller scale and it's not constrained to one type
of farming system.
Again, there's farms operating all around the world and we thought it was time to bring
all this research and development from all around the world to one single place. And
given the distance and the spread, we had to find a clever way of doing it. So we came
up with the idea of bringing up a Global AMS Research and Development Online Showcase.
This is basically a whole day, where we will have a lot of speakers. This is only possible
thanks to all the speakers that came on board. We have currently 22 speakers that have confirmed
their participation from 13 countries around the world. So thank you to all of them for
the time and collaboration to share their knowledge. It wouldn't be possible without
all their help. But thanks to all of you too, as I said, we have 153 people registered so
far from 24 countries. When we look at the spread, it's 16% of dairy farmers of dairy
staff, 52% of consultant or service provider, and 20% of researchers and students. So it's
a big spread of what people are out there.
What were the options? Basically I don't know if you saw that I put out there, but basically
we had to travel to all those countries of all those 13 countries that the speakers are
from. We would have to travel roughly around 86,000 kilometres, which is around two times
around the world, or one quarter the way to the moon. This would involve taking 25 flights
and spending almost seven days nonstop flying.
Somebody said, "Look, this is a low carbon footprint conference. It is a brilliant organisation
and we are cutting everybody's carbon footprint," which is good to hear. But some people also
said, "I was looking forward to some days away from home." Or, "Missing out on a lot
of frequent flyer points." So it depends how you look at it. It might change, but it's
definitely an effective and a clever way of doing it.
We have a jam-packed schedule today. You should have all received the schedule of all the
presentations. Each speaker will have 30 minutes. We will have two speakers in some of the sessions,
but they will still speak for 30 minutes all up.