Facility Focus: Is Your Wash System Doing its Job?
Keeping milk equipment clean is one of the most important factors to producing quality milk. However, taking the time to make sure the wash system is working correctly is a chore producers often skip. Keith Engel, a milk quality and milking equipment specialist at GEA Farm Technologies, provides these five tips to ensure your wash system is running as it should.
1.) Monitor Quality Counts
“There are certain checks producers should do at different intervals to make sure things are working correctly,” Engel says. “First and foremost, producers should monitor their quality counts to see if they’re getting success or failure from their wash system.”
Quality counts to monitor include: stand plate, preliminary incubation, lab pasteurized and coliform. However, Engel warns producers should not wait until their quality counts spike to look for problems.
2.) Take Time for a Walk-through
What commonly happens after someone turns on the wash system? They turn around and walk away. While it’s tempting to leave the parlor to tackle another task, Engel advises producers to periodically stick around while the milk equipment is washing to confirm everything is working correctly.
Monitor the vacuum level, look over liners and check to see if the air injectors are firing properly.
“Instead of hitting the button and getting out of there, do a quick walk-through regularly,” Engel says. “If something’s not working correctly, you have a bad wash system and you run the risk of having a high bacteria count and losing your premium. You can find so many things that might have been a failure otherwise just by taking a few minutes to look things over.”
3.) Monitor Chemical Usage
Using too much or too little chemical can lead to big problems when it comes to cleaning milking equipment. Engel encourages farms to regularly monitor their chemical levels to make sure consistent amounts are being used.
“At the same time each week, mark your barrels,” he advises. “If you do that, you should see those marks the same distance between each other. Then you know your chemical usage
is on track.”
4.) Temperature
Another action producers should periodically complete is to record the temperatures during the wash cycle. This can be done by using a temperature chart or simply taking the temperature of the water yourself. With temperature charts, benchmark the end wash temperature with the high temperature on your chart.
“We should always be at 160°F or higher at the start of the wash cycle and at 120°F or above at the end,” Engel says. “Watch what’s going on with your temperature to make sure your system
is in that range.”
5.) Schedule Maintenance Before Failure
We’re all guilty of pushing off regularly scheduled maintenance, but when something eventually breaks, we kick ourselves for not addressing the problem sooner.
“It’s simple, but it’s also easy to forget,” Engel says. “Make sure to have a replacement schedule for all of your parts and work with your equipment dealer to take note of what needs to be replaced before your quality counts start to spike or before something breaks. Clarify which tasks will be done by your dealer and which ones the farm will do.”
At the end of the day, it’s also important the producer forms a good relationship with their milking equipment dealer, Engel says.
“The dealer’s job is to help producers solve problems,” he says. “They are on the front lines and understand problems need to be addressed quickly and correctly. We definitely want to have a good relationship with our dairy producers and their milk quality partners because it’s all a partnership. We want to help them be profitable while also producing the highest quality product possible.”
