Robotic Technology Helps These Dairies Become Better
Robotic Dairy-Smart Farming Week
Farm Journal’s Smart Farming Week is an annual week-long emphasis on innovation in agriculture. The goal is to encourage you to explore and prioritize the technology, tools and practices that will help you farm smarter. Innovation today ensures an efficient, productive and sustainable tomorrow.
Dairying is a lot of work and it’s a 365 day a year job, so dairy producers are always looking for ways to streamline tasks on the farm. As Michelle Rook found, smart farming is also helping take dairy operations to new heights of productivity.
The United States dairy industry has long been a leader in technology and smart farming, and the newest chapter is robotics.
Drumgoon Dairy added robots in 2021 as part of their third farm addition in South Dakota. Drumgoon East is home to 20 robots milking about 1,470 cows. Several factors pushed the Elliott’s to make the investment.
“Labor is becoming harder to come by, more expensive and the willingness for people to stand and do some of the jobs that are traditional on dairy farms is probably less and less,” Rodney Elliott, owner, Drumgoon Dairy, located in Lake Norden, South Dakota, says.
Plus, when you remove the human element, cows can be milked more uniformly any time of day.
“So, for me the robot is about consistency, the robot does its job very well, very thorough very consistent. It does the same job at the end of a 12-hour shift as it does at the start of a 12-hour shift.”
For the cows a big advantage of a robotic system is milking is voluntary.
“So, it’s the cows choice when she wants to go and get milked. We’re not telling her it’s her choice when she wants to go.”
And the cows get milked in a quiet, stress-free environment three to four times a day at peak lactation, while eating a individually designed ration, production also increases.
“Here every cow is identified as an individual and to the degree they want to they can feed them a certain amount of pellets, they can determine the number of times she can be milked in a day.,” says Don Mayer, District Manager at DeLaval.
“The cows get milked very efficiently. Our cows are less than six minutes in the box and so they don’t spend more than 20 minutes of their day. The rest of their day they can eat, use the brushes, lay in the sand beds. And so, we will have more milk and I think our cows will last longer,” Elliott adds.
At every milking the robots also collect health and production data.
“They’re gathering a ton of information on that cow. I mean when the cow comes in and is identified and each one of the quarters the milk that is harvested is weighed and recorded, the conductivity of the milk so the quality of the milk is measured,” Mayer says.
At Drumgoon, they’ve also added automation in areas outside the milking parlor.
“Robots pushing up the feed, automatic scrappers, scraping the manure. We try to use as much automation in this barn as we can,” Elliott says.
In Wisconsin, Pagel’s Ponderosa Dairy and Hilltop Farm are also using smart farming technology including for heat detection. A system built by ParlorBoss and SenseHub work together in the rotary to identify cows coming into heat while they’re milking.
“If you look at the TV screen above, for example, this might show us if a cow is due for vaccination today, or if a cow is due to be inseminated today, because she's a heat, that information will be there,” says Dr. Don Niles DVM at Pagel’s Ponderosa Dairy and Hilltop Farm.
That’s taken headlock time from 5 to 6 hours a day down to just 4 to 5 hours per week.
“Years ago we used to put every single cow in the headlock, we would have to scan every cow, take a look at their temperatures. And then give a cow an exam. Now we're utilizing the SCR system to identify the cows that need attention so we can reduce the headlock times only treat the cows that we need. And then let everybody else go. So, it's less stress on our fresh callers by having the system,” says Chris Szydel, Manager at Pagel’s Ponderosa Dairy and Hilltop Farm.
Out in the barn, temperature control systems also help optimize temperature, keep cows cool and fly free.
Smart farming technology that’s all in the name of cow comfort, efficiency and productivity.
