Maximising production per robot

Daniel Gatas farms just outside Gothenburg with his cousin Jonas and their families in the southern part of Sweden. They are the 4thgeneration to farm at Ostergard and with Daniel’s son, Ruben following in their footsteps, the farm is now secure for the next generation.

Daniel began milking with robots just over 20 years ago, starting out with one Lely A2 in 2005 with 65 cows in milk, on a housed free access system. In 2010 he extended his cubicle housing and feed passage, pushing his numbers up to 130 cows with an additional robot. Both machines were then part exchanged for A5’s when they were launched in 2019.

The herd year is year-round calving and run as one group, so the challenge is to maintain 130 cows in milk, 365 days of the year, in order to maximise output. This has always been a big driver for Daniel and even in the early days he was consistently producing in excess of 2000Kg per day per robot. Since then, he has moved his production up considerably, with the average yield per cow running at 45Kg and output per robot peaking at 3000Kg per day. 

” The key is fine tuning everything to get the best throughput out of the robots” explains Daniel “this includes getting the most efficient settings on the milk access table and focusing on our milk speed, which is currently running at 3.6Kg/minute.”

 The family have consistently bred for a high milk speed in the herd and also uses rubber liners to influence it still further. ”It means that we have to change the milk liners more regularly then if we were using silicone ones” he continues “but it’s no bad thing as I do the other routine maintenance jobs at the same time which could get forgotten otherwise.”

The herd is fed on a mixed ration of 70:30 grass to corn silage and their own cereal blend of barley, oats and Triticale which is balanced up with soya and oil seed rape. ” We grow our own cereals and so we are keen to use as much of this as possible,” says Daniel. There is also a huge emphasis on producing excellent grass silage by making four or five cuts a year, which is high in energy and so 1.5Kg of straw is added to the mix, to insure healthy rumen activity.

The outside ration is worth maintenance plus 38 litres and then the herd is fed to yield in the robots. ”We have two feed hoppers in the robots and so we feed our own cereal mix here, as well as a protein pellet to balance it up. We also dose propylene Glycol for all cows in early lactation.” says Daniel. “Currently we are feeding an average of 7Kg per cow per day in the robots.”

The farm is 440 hectares and supports an arable enterprise in addition to the dairy herd.” Primarily we are dairy farmers and currently we only feed a proportion of the cereals that we grow back to the herd, with the rest being sold off the farm.” Explains Daniel,” So, we are now considering the option of doubling our cow numbers with two more robots, in order increase our efficiency still further. “

Stan wanted to challenge the herd to eat more of the total mixed ration on the feed fence and so whereas he was feeding 5Kg of pellets in the robots in the old barn, his aim was to reduce this to 2Kg on the new guided barn.

“We achieved this within two months of being in the new facility” continues Stan “without affecting the herd’s performance and so we decided to continue dropping the pellets, which we did over a ten-month period until we were down to 100 grams per day. We then cut it completely but we found that it did have a negative effect on labour for training heifers and fresh cows. So, we now feed 100 grams per day for the first 60 days and then there is no feed. The nicest part of the guided system is that it gives us options, we can feed nothing or we could feed more pellet, if for example, forage quality is poor one year. It all depends how the costs of protein/energy compare in pellets versus adding them in the TMR.”

The milk price is Canada is based on weight of butterfat, so the other bonus of feeding more TMR is that they have been able to influence the milk quality more easily with their current ration of Corn silage, Triticale, Soya and a blend. “Feeding in this way has helped us to reduce our feed costs by a dollar (55p) per cow per day,” explains Stan “which is a considerable saving over a year.”