Zero Grazing with Fullwood Joz
Argoed Farm.Cenarth.Ceredigion
Geraint Owens farms at Argoed in Cenarth, near Newcastle Emlyn in Ceredigion, with his parents and young family.
In 2014 he set about building a slatted shed with his father, to house 150 cows, designed with a view to accommodating robots in the future. By 2018 they felt that the time was right and they moved out of their conventional parlour and invested in two Fullwood Joz machines.
Building Design
As the shed was designed with robots in mind, the feeding is on the outside of the building which allows the cows to be run as one group, on a free access system. The slatted floor also means that no tractors are entering the building to scrape out and so the cows have access to the robots 24 hours a day.
Automatic foot baths were also incorporated at the exit of the robots, so that the cows go through a 1% formalin solution after every milking.
Merlin2 specification
- Ear tag ID
- Quarter conductivity
- Cell count monitoring was available but not included in the package
- Heat detection and rumination via collars
Grazing
Geraint tried grazing but found the uncertainty of the weather and installing the right infrastructure too uncertian and so he decided to bring the grass to the cows, when he managed to source a good second hand zero grazing machine.
Zero Grazing
He has worked hard at this and now zero grazes from March to November, but importantly he adds it to his TMR mix in his feeder wagon rather than feeding it straight out
“We have spent 2 years getting this right,” explains Geraint “If you just feed out fresh grass, once a day, it heats very quickly and you don’t get the intakes. So, we add it to grass and maize silage in the feeder wagon, with a blend before feeding it out twice a day.”
In this way they are feeding for maintenance plus 23Kg on the feed fence and then top up in the robots up to a maximum of 12Kg for the highest yielding cows over 4 visits.
Future Plans
"The only down side to robots,” explains Geraint “is that your cow numbers are dictated by the robots, which for us is a maximum is 110 on two machines. So, we are now considering a third one so that we can maximise the output from our building.”