In his book, The Essence of Chaos, Edward Lorenz described the butterfly effect as, "The phenomenon that a small alteration in the state of a dynamic system will cause subsequent states to differ greatly from the states that would have followed without the alteration." That's a mouthful. In more simple terms, the theory is that a butterfly in India could flap its wings and start a chain of events that could cause a tornado in Iowa. The parallel in robotic milking is, everything that happens at the feed bunk has potential to change how cows move in the barn.
My Cow Corner blog article, “One More Meal – One More Milking” discussed management practices which can improve dry matter intake and encourage one more trip to the bunk. One more trip to the bunk is one more opportunity to get the cow to the robot. That extra trip to the robot may repeat cyclically to influence visits at another time of day. A recent customer experience gave me a chance to measure the effect.
I consult at a farm where mature cows have historically been fed PMR between 9 and 10 AM and again at about 3 PM. After spending some time in the barn, I asked whether it was possible to change the barn routine to stimulate more activity earlier in the day. The customer decided to deliver the morning feeding earlier – between 7 and 8 AM. We discussed the change a month later and the customer had not observed a significant difference.
I volunteered to dig a little deeper, to see if the change could be measured in the robot software. I graphed the number of milkings for the mature cow group for 30 days before and after the change. In the figure below, milkings are on the X-axis and time of day is on the Y-axis. The orange line indicates the number of milkings for the pen before the change in feeding times. The grey line is the number of milkings after. I focused on the time when the feed was delivered.
I was pleased to see that a minor change in the feeding schedule resulted in almost 4 more milkings during the hour when feed was delivered. Interesting, but 4 milkings during one hour of the day is probably not a game changer. I thought about cyclical behavior and wondered whether the difference would be more significant if I looked at the whole day. The next graph shows the difference. The blue line indicates the number of milkings before the change and the red line indicates the milkings after the change. I discovered that the feeding change resulted in better robot utilization for the whole day, but especially during the slow time in the very early morning.
The initial results are encouraging. We will continue to monitor milking behavior. Will cows regress to the old behavior over time, or will they make even better use of the early morning hours in the future?
What changes might make a difference on your farm? Allowing more refused feed? Changing the push-up frequency? Feeding more frequently? Contact me and we can measure your results.
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