EVERYTHING IS INTERCONNECTED WHEN YOU MILK WITH ROBOTS

Paul Windemuller and I visited about robotic milking on his Agculture podcast. We covered everything from feeding to fetching, and from barn design to cow comfort. Paul’s comment about his own experience summed up the episode, “I’ve been fascinated by it (robotic milking) because you really see how interconnected everything is on a dairy farm, and with a dairy cow, when you milk with robots.” In other words, it’s important to use a system approach to problem solving, rather than a linear approach. A linear approach looks at cause and effect of each variable independently. A systems approach recognizes the interdependence of all the variables.

A Linear Approach

I saw a great example on a recent farm visit. The farm had a 2-robot pen stocked with 70 cows per robot, averaging 2.1 milkings, and 18% idle time. The goal was to reduce the idle time and milk the cows more frequently. Increasing milking frequency through a linear approach could be as simple as making the milking permission less restrictive. More cows could be milked more frequently. Most likely, milkings would go up and idle time would go down. The solution would not result in higher milk production if late lactation cows were milked more frequently, but milking frequency stayed the same for fresh cows. Rather than milk the right cows at the right time, the wrong cows could be milked, at the wrong time, even more than before.

A System Approach

We really need more information to address this problem from a system perspective. If we consider that the pen averages .5 refusals per cow per day, it becomes clear that the cows

are not moving around the barn enough for more milkings, regardless of the milking permission. The real solution might start with changing the relationship between the PMR and the robot feed. We would also want to review milkings in the first week to evaluate the training program. Reproductive records might show that there were a lot of late lactation cows that had become too lazy to come to the robot. We might discover that people were doing things in the barn that interfered with cow traffic. And yes, we might even circle back to milking permission at some point. A system approach requires an understanding of all the variables involved, and how they interact.

Every member of the management team on a progressive dairy brings critical expertise in their area. The nutrition consultant understands nutrient requirements, forage inventories, and commodity markets to put the right package in front of the cows. The veterinarian brings expertise in reproductive management and milk quality. If AI specialists are involved, they choose the right genetic package and inseminate the right cows at the right time. The equipment dealer keeps the robots running and the software up to date. I won’t even try to name the rest of the team – I am sure I would forget someone, and they are all important. With a systems approach to robotic milking, all of those roles intersect in one place – the milking robot. Cow Corner is at that intersection with a unique understanding of the relationship between all of those variables, and a goal of helping all of those experts, to promote strategic dairy herd management for better robotic milking.