Focusing on milk speed to maximise robot output

Robert and Bryony Symms farm near Sherbourne in Dorset with their son Jake. Three years ago, they decided to install four Lely A5 robots, to milk their herd of 250 Holsteins.

” Our parlour was still in good working order”, explains Jake “but we were spending too much time putting cups on cows, rather than doing more important management tasks, so robots were just the next logical step, to improve herd health and production.”

The four robots were retro fitted at the end of their cubicle housing to milk two groups of 110 cows each on a free access system. They knew the importance of regular foot bathing on a housed system, but did not want them placed on the exit of each robot as it can affect cow flow. So, the Lely Center in Yeovil came up with a design which allowed two robots to access one footbath, which was positioned away from the robot exits.

“With this layout we can select how often we want to footbath and so currently we do it three times a week, but it doesn’t affect cow flow on these days, because the baths are far enough away from the robots,” explains Jake.

The cows have always been bedded on sand, so Robert and Jake were keen to continue with this when the robots were fitted. ”We know it’s the best bedding material for our cows,” explains Jake “and so we were determined to make it work with the new system, even though we knew it would cause more wear and tear on the robots.” As a result, they fitted chains instead of cord ACR’s and they scrape the slurry out twice a day with a tractor, into a lagoon. So, there are no slatted channels anywhere in the building.

Jake uses Kite consulting for all of his nutrition advice and currently the herd are fed for Maintenance plus 28 litres outside, with a mixed ration of maize, grass silage and blend before being topped up in the robots up to a maximum of 10Kg per cow per day.

 The yield increased significantly when they went on to the robots due to the additional milkings and after 12 months they were averaging 43Kg per cows and producing around 2300Kg per robot per day. In turn, this bought another challenge in terms of machine capacity and a lack free time (time when the robots are not milking cows) when they were targeting 55 cows on each machine. ”The problem was we were getting under 10% free time and so we were fetching more cows” says Jake “and when the machines were being serviced it took a long time to catch up.”

The Lely centre in Yeovil suggested changing the silicone liners to rubber ones as this would increase the milk speed and so reduce box time. The results were good and bought the average milk speed up to 3.1Kg per minute but it did mean that the liners had to be changed every fortnight instead of every 8 weeks. Then, in April this year, Lely launched their silicone Scarler liner, designed for high yielding cows and so Jake tried them on his A5’s. The result was the milk speed increased to 3.6Kg/minute which gave them 11% free time with the same level of production and they only had to be changed after 10,000 milkings.