ROBOTIC FARM FEATURE – WINCH’S PINE GROVE FARMS

Peter Winch operates Winch’s Pine Grove Farms with his wife Christina, and their sons Randy, Wesley, and Matthew. Randy and Wesley are employed off the farm, and Matthew is a student at UW-Madison. Christina also teaches at Southwest Tech in Fennimore. The farm is located just outside of Fennimore, in the driftless region of southwest Wisconsin. They moved from a parlor to the green site robot barn in 2018.

The sand bedded barn has 4 DeLaval robots with fully guided traffic. It is a 4-row barn with a

central feed alley, and 2 pens with 2 robots per pen. The cows face tail to tail. The robots are in a tandem configuration with 1 robot room for each pair of robots. Cows enter the comingled commitment pen through one sort gate, and exit through another sort gate after milking. The exit gate can send cows to feed, through the foot bath, or into a separation pen. The separation pen is used for management tasks and fresh cows. Recently, Peter added extra headlocks to the separation pen so that all of his herd check cows can be handled there.

With guided traffic, Winch’s feed less than 3 pounds per cow per day in the robots. They have not eliminated robot feed. Among other things, the robot feed allows them to give first calf heifers a little extra energy. With the low feeding rate, they have switched from a pellet to a meal. The meal gives them more blending and delivery options than the pellet they were feeding.

Winch’s upgraded from DeLaval classics to new V300’s during April. As the number of cows increased, more milking capacity was needed. Peter also wanted to add progesterone monitoring for reproductive management and that could not be added to the classics. The barn was built with left-handed robots on one side and right-handed robots on the other. It is stocked with one pen for younger cows and one pen for older cows. Cows did not always adjust well when they switched pens and switched from right hand to left hand robots, so the upgrade included reconfiguring so all of the robots are left hand.

Both robots in each pen were switched on the same day. The first pen was switched on a Tuesday. That was the mature cow pen, and left-hand robots were replaced with left-hand robots. The other pen was switched the following Thursday, and right-hand robots were replaced with left-hand robots.

The mature cows adjusted well to the new robots. The barn was down for about 8 hours, so the cows had to be pushed for the next 24 hours to catch up and to make sure the cows learned to use the new robots. It took about 6 weeks for milking frequency and production to get back to normal. A few of the later lactation cows may need to freshen again before milking frequency completely returns to normal.

The initial adjustment took a little longer for the heifers because they had to learn to enter the robots from the other direction. Cows needed to be directed to the robot entrance for a few days to prevent the commitment pen from filling up with unmilked cows. The commitment pen was left open overnight for a few nights to allow cows to continue milking unattended. Like the mature cow pen, the heifer pen was almost back to normal after about 6 weeks.

After 2 months, Winch’s are realizing the extra capacity they hoped to gain by upgrading robots. Time will tell whether the matching robots will help cows adjust when they switch pens. Data from the progesterone monitoring is just starting to come in. Winch’s are looking forward to reaching new levels with their new robots.