MILKING WITH ROBOTS IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

I was invited to speak at a Farmwest Discovery, in Bunbury, Australia, in early September. Farmwest is a dairy service company, handling DeLaval dairy equipment, milk testing, dehorning and freeze branding, semen sales, bull collection, and artificial insemination service and training. Discovery is a trade show organized by Farmwest, and sponsored by several dairy suppliers. We scheduled several virtual and in-person farm visits in conjunction with the conference. It was great opportunity to learn about the Western Australia dairy industry, and how and why robots are used there.

Western Australia is the largest state in Australia, approximately comprising the entire western third of the continent. Most of the dairy production is in the southwest corner of the state, south of the state capital of Perth. Temperature ranges between 50 and 80 degrees. Average annual rainfall is just under 30 inches, with little to now rainfall in the summer months of December through February. Cows graze annual grasses during the fall, winter and spring. Some of the pastures are harvested for silage which is the primary forage during the dry summer months. Most farms do not have barns. Some have shaded feed pads for summer silage feeding. Others feed stored feed on the pastures during summer.

The pasture-based forages favor seasonal calving with peak lactation during the peak

pasture months. However, most of the milk is used for fluid consumption, so milk processors have created a pricing system to encourage production during the summer months. Many farms calve their cows in 2 or 4 batches each year.

Milking facilities are rotary parlors or robots, under a shelter, usually with no cattle housing. Grain is fed on the rotaries and robots because the pasture forage needs to be supplemented. Some of the robotic installations include grain feeders to allow cows more grain than they have time to eat in the robots. Most of the robotic installations are configured like batch milking. Cows are moved from the pasture, to the robots, in groups, and returned to the pasture as a group. True batch milking installations graze their cows in 2 or more groups. Multiple groups allow milking in shifts to make better use of the robots, while returning groups to the pasture quickly after milking. Most cows in batch milking installations are milked twice daily.

Voluntary milking facilities look like batch milking facilities. The difference is that voluntary facilities have automated gates so cows move from pasture to robots and back individually. Cows come to the robots to get access to a new paddock, and milking permission determines whether they are milked, sent back to the paddock, or given access to a new paddock.

Some farmers in Western Australia are transitioning to freestall housing, using stored feed throughout the year. They have experienced higher production with stored feed during the dry summer months and believe they can capitalize on that year-round. They can also improve cow comfort during the warm summer months.

While robots are used very differently in Western Australia, some things are common to voluntary milking anywhere in the world. Quality and availability of forage drive cow traffic, whether that forage is pasture in Australia, or corn silage in the American Midwest. Healthy transition cows that start lactation quickly and breed back on time are crucial to either system. Different goals determine the different strategies in either system. We can learn a lot from each other.