If you ask five different farmers what success with robotic milking looks like, you’ll likely get at least four different answers. Achieving that success looks different for everyone too: a different permission setting here, a routine change there, or re-grouping pens by age or stage of lactation. Yet, many of these steps trace back to one thing: overall management of the farm.
Al Dornacker milks around 350 cows in six Lely Astronaut A5s in south-central Wisconsin. Throughout the hot summer months, his herd has maintained production of 99 lb. per cow. Dornacker says many factors contribute to this, including cow comfort in the new barn.
“They seem to handle the heat better, and we lose very little reproduction over the summer,” he says.
Dornacker attributes reproductive success, and subsequent high production, to genetic indexing with the robots.
“We wanted to know, how can we keep the best udders under the cow? Which ones do you keep, cull, which ones are good cows?” he says. “So we got an index that was made to take her robot traits: how much she kicks, how fast she milks, her components and production. And that tells us whether to use sexed semen, regular semen or breed her to angus.”
It was John Gerbitz of Cow Corner robotic dairy consulting, who created the index. As part of his work with Cow Corner, Gerbitz also completed a cash flow budget to help Dornacker decide whether to continue milking in both the parlor and five robots or to add a sixth robot.
One idea he presented was to shut down the parlor and slightly overstock the robot barn but maintain milking with five robots. The analysis proved this would cash flow better in the short term, but based on long-term goals, the decision was ultimately made to both shut down the parlor and add the sixth robot.
“Labor efficiency has improved tremendously, and overall production has gone up,” Dornacker says. “Was it a good stepping stone, and would I do it that way again? Yes, but probably over a year and a half and not four-and-a-half years.”
Dornacker shares another piece of his strategy that has both added profitability and truly enabled him to be more flexible with his time.
“Keep a well-organized inventory of spare parts so that you can fix it yourself and don’t need to hire the guy to come out every time,” he says. “The downtime is what kills your production average.”
Tune In To Your Herd
Kristin Quist, Herd Manager of Minglewood Inc. in northwestern Wisconsin, has also enlisted Cow Corner to enhance the management efforts of her family’s 1,200-cow dairy.
“I think the robots have allowed some of our better cows to meet thresholds that we couldn’t meet in our old facility, but also in the robot facility, there’s a lot more cow comfort built in,” Quist says. “We’re six, seven years in, and still finding protocols that work better for us every day.”
Minglewood milks with eight DeLaval VMS Classic robots complemented by a parlor. An open mind for changes and improvements has empowered a lot of progress — even on the older model of robots.
“You need to be in tune with your herd but also not scared to go out there and try for that little bit more,” she says. “Our goal at the end of the day is that we’re always evolving and always striving to do better.”
Recently, Quist says they’ve been adjusting milking permissions more often.
“You might think you have your milking permissions set where they need to be, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to be looking at them constantly and adjusting and making sure you’re meeting your cows where they’re at.”
Quist has also been dialing in on incompletes.
“Because we have classic robots, at certain days in milk we need to retrain our cows with the robot,” she says. “Since we started doing that, incompletes have been better and so have mastitis cases, just because we’re taking the time to reteach as the cow changes.”
“As long as they can get in and get milked the way they need to be, they’re going to do their thing,” Quist adds. “And I honestly don’t want to know who they are. If I do, that typically means they are a problem cow.”
And that’s one way Gerbitz supports robotic dairies behind the scenes.
“I’m able to check on settings for individual cows so they don’t have to,” he says. “If I see something that will prevent the cow from being milked in the best way possible, I can take care of that for them right away.”
What Gerbitz sees on one farm often helps him tune into opportunities on another.
“I get to see things on so many different farms and see them more closely just by checking data and having weekly conversations with the farmer,” he says.
“Everything impacts how robots perform: forage quality, reproduction, transition cow health and cow comfort,” Gerbitz adds. “All brands of robots are capable of milking cows efficiently. Managers who pay attention to detail and take care of the fundamentals of milk production will be successful with either robots or parlor milking.”
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