World's Largest Robotic Dairy Coming to Chile
By the end of the year Agricola ANCALI’s 6,500 cow dairy near Los Ángeles, Chile will be home to 64 individual robotic milkers.
It was announced Tuesday at DeLaval’s VMS Pro Vegas event in Las Vegas that Fundo El Risquillo farm owned by Agricola ANCALI will become the world’s largest robotic dairy.
The dairy currently milks 460 cows with eight DeLaval VMS robotic milkers. The first robots were installed in October 2014. At the moment, four rotary parlors milk another 6,000 cows.
Construction is underway to build another separate barn with eight more robotic milkers. The barn will be completed by the end of March.
When the new barn has been completed there are plans to install 48 VMS robotic milkers into the free stall barn housing cows currently milked in rotary parlors. The 48 robots would milk 3,120 cows by December.
Once the installation has finished the dairy will milk more than 4,000 cows in robots.
“We are preparing for the future,” says Odrióm Escobar, dairy operations manager for Agricola ANCALI.
Escobar has served as the manager since 2012 and he estimates cows in the robots produce almost 10% more milk in the robots compared to the rotaries.
Milking in the eight robots currently onsite averages 5,754 lb. per robot each day. Cows milked in robots produce 99.65 lb. per day and spend 6 minutes 49 seconds in the robot at each milking. Typically a cow will average 2.9 milkings per day.
