ABC Grazing with Fullwood JOZ

The Griffiths family, farm at Blancorse near St Clears in Carmarthenshire and in 2015 they decided to move out of their abreast parlour, when they installed two Fullwood Joz robotic Merlin2  in to their existing cubicle shed. The decision to leave the parlour was a health and lifestyle choice but they haven’t looked back since making the change.

The machines fitted perfectly in to their cubicle building, which kept the cost of the project to a minimum for their herd of 110 Friesian Holstiens. 

• Ear Tag 1D
• Quarter conductivity
• Cell count detection was available but not included

The system is free access, allowing the cows to decide when they want to eat, lie down or get milked which results in a visit rate of 3.4/cow/day in the winter and 3 in the summer when they are out at grass. The average yield per cow is currently 35 litres per cow but it has been as high as 40.

“Since installing the robots we have seen an increase in the cows yield and a drop in mastitis” explains Will Griffiths “purely from the extra milkings per day we are achieving in the robots. About 100 cows in milk is good for us and if we go beyond that with current yields, it puts everything under pressure and we don’t seem to get much more milk in the tank.”

The cows have access to grazing from April through to September for 18 hours a day, on two blocks of grass before being buffer fed in the shed for 6 hours a day. A grazing gate allows any cows that have been milked to leave the cubicle building to access paddock A from midday until 9pm, at which point the herd have access to paddock B until 6am the following morning. They are then held in the building for their buffer feed until midday when the recycle starts again.

Will, also uses a plate meter linked to an app to measure the grass, which tells him exactly where to put the electric fence each day. In this way he able to allocate the right amount dry matter for each visit which helps to keep the cows moving without penalising their yield. In this way the herd still visit the robots 3 times per day and maintain their yield of 35 litres/cow.

“It’s taken us about 8 years to find the perfect grazing system for our farm,” says Will “but this is really working well now.”