START WITH A ROBOTIC MILKING READINESS AUDIT

Planning a new robotic milking facility involves a lot of decisions. There are hours of visiting farms, and working with dealers, manufacturers, not to mention your own team. Those hours will help you decide whether to build new or retrofit; choose between guided flow and free traffic; determine how many cows per robot; and what kind of handling facilities you should include. Through all this, be sure to include some introspective time evaluating your strengths and weaknesses at home. How will they influence your design choices? What needs to be improved before the robots go online? How will your labor supply, feed quality, milk quality, and transition health work in a robotic milking environment? Do a robotic milking readiness audit on your farm to find out.

Labor Supply

Labor is at the top of the list, because it is one of the main reasons people look at robots in the first place. Most people expect the new barn to allow them to milk the same cows with less labor, or more cows with the same labor. At the very least, scheduling labor should become more flexible with your new robots. Either way, you need to think about different skills, like maintaining robots and understanding software. Think about how you will divide the roles among your present team, what skill sets need to be added, and what skills won’t be needed anymore. Don’t assume that someone else on the team will enjoy washing robots, and answering 2 AM alarms.

Feed Quality

Think about why cows come to the robots. Back up a step, and think about why cows get out

of their stalls, because they need to do that before they come to the robot. Whether your barn is free traffic or guided flow, rate of passage and feed availability influence when cows get out of their stalls. It will be more important to provide highly digestible forages that pass through the cow quickly, so she has room for more and gets out of her stall to get it. It will be more important to have feed in the bunk all the time so she knows it’s worth getting out of her stall at any time, day or night. Think about your forage production, or purchases, from a cow flow perspective.

Milk Quality

Start with a bulk tank culture so you are aware of the pathogens that can cause mastitis on your farm. Consider culturing individual clinical cows. Contagious pathogens can spread more rapidly in robots because each milking unit touches more cows, as compared to a parlor. Get a head start on managing contagious pathogens through treatment and culling. If an outbreak does occur in the robots it will help to know whether it is a new pathogen or one you have already managed. Work particularly hard on eliminating organisms like Staph Aureus which are carried by subclinical cows and spread through milking equipment.

Transition Health

Cows need a fast start in robot barns to build dry matter intake and trips to the robot as quickly as possible. Regardless of cow traffic, cows need to have a strong appetite right after calving to get them moving around the barn. In free flow barns, they need to make more milk than the PMR supports, as soon as possible, so they have a reason to go to the robot to meet the rest of their needs. Review feed availability and space in your dry and prefresh groups, and think about how they might change in the new barn. Think about how you monitor cows after calving, and how that might change with robots.

While you are planning your new robotic milking facility, be sure to include a robotic milking readiness audit. Review your present labor supply, feed quality, milk quality, and transition management. You probably want to include other things like reproductive performance and hoof health. That's a lot to think about. Cow Corner can help. We work with robotic milking every day. Contact us to schedule a visit.