Robotic milking nutrition

We have teamed up with For Farmers who are available to offer on going support through their OptiRobot programme for all brands of robots. This is a tool that monitors the robotic milking system performance on a daily basis. 

It can analyse the data in easy-to-understand graphs and tables that give unique insight into what is going on at individual cow level.

OptiRobot provides daily access to huge amounts of data including feed intakes, visits and yields. It uses historical as well as real-time data at herd and individual cow level and enables ForFarmers’ robotic specialists to refine feed and suggest changes to boost performance. 

The programme is headed up by Bas Van Santen, Robotic Product Manager, who has years of experience in robotics. “Looking at headline figures is one thing, but analysing in more depth will allow us to look at difference between the top and bottom cows compared with the average which can flag up some areas for improvement.” he explains.

"For example, this may be something as simple as changing the number of robot visits allowed per cow because milking cows with sufficient milk each visit to the robot can save money. It costs around 25p a milking to milk a cow in maintenance, service, water, electricity and teat spray each time. Meanwhile cows that yield much less, but visit the robot more frequently use up valuable robot time and reduce the output of the robot. Those cows may be going into the robot even if they’re not getting more cake – trying their luck – and that will cost you money. So,changing the number of milkings allowed in this case will optimize robot performance and reduce costs.”

"Analysing data also helps farmers stay focused on the goals they have for the business whether they are related to health, yield or profit" continues Bas."Setting goals is particularly important for a robotic system, as not every farmer is striving for the same things and knowing what their priorities helps us to make informed decisions”