HOW FAST SHOULD FEED BE DISPENSED IN MILKING ROBOTS?
- Aug 27, 2025
- 2 min read
On a farm visit last week, we spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out why the herd averaged 2.6 refusals per cow per day. Refusals or rejections occur when a cow is released from the robot unmilked because she doesn’t have milking permission. An average of at least 1 refusal per cow per day indicates that cows are coming to the robots frequently enough to achieve the desired number of milkings. More than 2 is not necessarily a bad thing. At some point the refusals take time away from cows that need to be milked, and I begin to wonder why a cow would make all those trips to the robot. On this farm, we found individual cows with more than 35 refusals per day. It turned out that uneaten feed in the feed bowls was bringing cows back to the robot. We looked at a lot of feed settings before we focused on the dispense rate. To dispense feed correctly in the milking robots we considered how fast cows can eat, how fast cows can milk, and what’s happening in the barn.
