Boumatic Farm Stories

Martin Brown farms in Staffordshire with his wife and 3 children, Henry, Grace and Magnus. In 2016 he suffered with ill health and had to take some time out, leaving the rest of the family to milk the herd of 150 Friesian Holsteins through their herringbone parlour.

 “The children were still at school back then,” explains Martin,” and so it put us all under a huge amount of pressure.”

Thankfully, Martin made a good recovery but knew that something had to change to make life easier for him and the next generation. So, it was either a case of selling the herd or to look at installing robots.

The herd are fed a PMR diet outside of grass silage, maize and a rape meal blend, which is worth M+27 litres and the remainder is fed through the robots.

Today he is milking 142 cows, averaging 34 litres with 3 visits per day. Importantly though, Martin runs the system with 25% free time on the robots, which means that there is no pressure on him or the robots.

Future plans are to work the yields up slightly and to get more milk per visit. Martin is also interested in grazing the herd next year, for part of the day on an AB system, as he does like to see cows out at grass as long as it is not effecting yield.

“Robots have been good for us as a family,” explains Martin, “at one stage I though that the cows would have to go, but this has future proofed our dairy farm, for the next generation.”

Family team, Brian, Margaret and Mark Price, farm their herd of 90 Freisen Holsteins in Asterley near Shrewsbury. In 2022 they had reached the point where they knew that they had to replace their existing 6/12 herringbone parlour, which was installed in 1996 because milking was taking too long and it was passed its sell by date.

Mark was spending a good deal of time off the farm, working as a nutritionist and so could not commit to milking the cows twice a day, while Brian felt that he wanted to take a step back from being tied to the cows. So, they decided that the next stage could be robotics, if they could get the economics to stack up.

The family considered a few different brands, but were attracted to the Boumatic Gemini because they knew they would get great support from their local dealership B D Atkins and the double box offered them the ideal solution for their cow numbers and layout.

“The nice thing about the Gemini,” explains Mark, “is that the double box can milk up to 100 cows. So, with our herd of 90 it was a great fit, as we only needed one machine. It is also modular and so the building worked required was minimum. We also liked the rear leg milking feature which seems to be unique to Boumatic.”

The robot was ordered in March 2023 and Mark set about doing most of the building work himself. “We liked the idea of incorporating a pit in to the design as this would make it easier for any manually attachments or treating the cows,” continues Mark. “Apart from that it was only a case of building slurry channels and extending off the existing building.”

In addition, it was decided that the dairy could remain in the same place, as it was only 30 metres from the robot and was not going to cause any issues for the milk delivery line over that distance. However, it was decided to replace the bulk tank as it was outdated and unable to communicate with the robot. “We decided to go for a 7000 litre DX tank,” explains Mark “as this gave us enough capacity for every other day collection and could be totally integrated into the new system. We also considered a buffer tank in the dairy, but felt that we had enough spare capacity on the double box and so this was another expense that we could avoid.”

The building work was completed that Summer before taking delivery of the robot, which was craned into position, straight off the lorry. Then it was just a matter of completing the installation, before using the robot as an out of parlour feeder for a week to get the cows used to their new environment. “This, was a great move,” explains Mark “because when we started milking in the robot, the cows were very calm.”