“He came up to us and said, ‘The cows are still milking.’ and we said “Of course, they’re always milking.”
For the driver it was a new concept to understand – robotic milking where the cows decide when they want to be milked.
Joanne’s cows (Darrin is in charge of the sheep on the farm) wander into the dairy when they want to, go through the Lely pre-entry Grazeway which calculates the last time they were milked and either drafts them towards the three Lely A4 Astronauts (the pre-milking area) or towards the post-milking area where there’s a water trough.
The cows needing to be milked line up behind one of the three bails and when the gate opens the cow walks in and starts munching on the dairy pellets and molasses dropped into the feeder as the cups line up on the teats. When milking is finished the gates open, the cow walks into the area where the water trough is and then ambles back to the paddock, maybe getting a scratch from the Lely Luna cow brush on the way.
Happy cows and happy staff mean that Joanne spends about an hour a day at the dairy at most. She moves the fences in the paddocks, washes the concrete floor, changes the milk filter and checks the computer. Not that she has to go down to the dairy to do that as an app on her phone shows all the information she needs and warns her if something is going wrong. She can even watch what is happening in the dairy on her phone by a live video feed from the cameras in the building’s roof.
“Some people call robotic milking factory farming,” she said.
“I think that’s wrong. It’s free range farming.”
The couple built the dairy last year and installed two of the Lely A4 Astronauts robots in December, spending about 10 days, all day, training the cows to use it.
“They got it after about four days but we kept keeping a watch on them. In the end we had to make ourselves walk away and leave them and the computer to it and it’s worked,” Joanne said.
“It takes four days to train a cow. It takes a lot longer to train a dairy farmer.”
All the cows but one adapted.
“We had one that wriggled around too much when the robot was trying to attach the cups so we sent it back down to the other farm but we could have persevered and it may have come right.”
The Waituna 445ha farm was bought in the 1970s by Darrin’s parents when just 160ha was in grass, the rest flax and tussock, but the couple took it over outright 12 years ago. They farm, with their son Ken, 2500 Romney ewes with Border Leicester cross and use a Texel for terminals. They’ve also raised beef cattle but “there’s just not the profit in it”.
With Ken, 21, and their daughter Kimberley, 14, keen to go farming and sheep and beef not providing the returns, they thought about converting to dairying, milking 600-700 cows with a large rotary.
“Then the dairy farm down the road came up for sale six years ago and we bought that instead, to see if we liked dairying,” Joanne said.
The 170ha farm milks 400 cows and to stock it they initially bought 100 pedigree Jerseys from long-time breeders Gerald and Annette Gunther.
“We didn’t have any knowledge about dairy cows and it was the best thing we did because as well as getting the cows we got Gerald. His knowledge helped us a lot and his cows have become the backbone of the herd. He died just a week before we started using the robots which was sad because he really wanted to see ‘his girls’ in action.”
They liked dairying.
“We liked the money, we liked cows, we just didn’t like the grind and the hassle.”
While staff had been fantastic the turnover had been high as they wanted to go on to bigger and better jobs. So the couple decided to sell the farm and give robots a go instead on the home block.
The new owners take over on June 3 and, with a fourth and final Lely A4 Astronaut being installed during the winter, Joanne’s new herd will swell to almost 300.
“This spring we’ll be training heifers to use the robots so that will be interesting. But we’ve been using a Lely Calm automatic calf feeder for years so they’re used to walking into a box to get fed.
“The bull didn’t cope too well in December. He always seemed to be in the wrong place and we could only just get the collar around his neck. We might have to rethink how we do it next season.”
To identify mating heats, sensors in the robots test milk temperature. As well, the Qwes HR tag responder, which each cow wears around its neck, not only records when they arrive and leave the dairy, but also has a motion sensor used as another indicator for heats. Identified cows can then be drafted for AI.
The building, the first two Lely A4 Astronauts, the effluent pond, power into the paddock and the consent process cost about $1.1 million. Each robot can handle about 80 cows or 2200 litres of milk a day and costs about $250,000.
“It’s really not a lot dearer than a rotary but there are no staff costs.”
Going to Open Country Dairy and selling their Fonterra shares allowed that spending but now the couple are back with Fonterra for the robot dairy.
“At the moment the cows are getting about a kilo of dairy pellets a day and a drizzle of molasses while they’re getting milked, which is about the same as what cows get with normal in-dairy feeding,” Joanne said.
“They’re milking 1.8 times a day and on average giving 13 litres a day, although some are more than 20 litres, with the milksolids percentage just less than 11%.”
A mineral dosage system, Lely Titania, has also been installed allowing Joanne to dose cows with bloat oil and minerals each time they are milked.
With no water troughs in the paddocks, cows have to come into the dairy for drafting when they are thirsty.
“It’s a training tool at the moment, but in the longer term I think there’ll be benefits of having water in the paddocks.”
She has had to shoo the occasional cow out of a paddock and into the dairy when she has got the break wrong and there’s too much grass left. But otherwise when the gate changes, allowing the cows to go to their next paddock, most of the cows are on the move.
Because the farm is in the Waituna Catchment – it borders the lagoon – the consent process for the dairy conversion wasn’t easy. Several groups opposed it and during the hearings it was obvious councillors didn’t understand the concept of robotic milking, the couple said.
“We’ve got consent to milk 400 cows, not that we will probably go close to that number, but we have to have an effluent pond big enough as if the dairy was a herringbone or a rotary,” Joanne said.
“We produce probably about a quarter of the effluent that we would if it was a conventional dairy and there’s no way we’ll have enough effluent to get right round the dairy unit in a season.”
“And the lagoon is in really good health,” Darrin said.
“I’ve been fishing there in the last couple of weeks and caught eight trout. It’s open to the sea at the moment so they were big sea-run trout. Their stomachs were full of baby flounder and crabs.”
With a high rainfall, the couple avoid winter cropping, instead letting the cows forage among tussocks and rough grazing areas.
Their planned start of calving is August 10 with Joanne preferring Jerseys as they seem to put less pressure on the soil. They use semen from Semex and World Wide Sires, and raise nearly all of their calves.
“Because the base of our herd came from the Gunthers, they have really good temperaments and great udder conformation and we are continuing to breed for those traits. However, because a lot have imported sires, their Breeding Worth (BW) is very low.
“We realised early on there was very little correlation between BW and the performance of our cows and the majority of our best cows have negative BWs and I’m happy to keep them that way.”
As they sell Jersey bulls and some heifers each year and, because many people like high BWs, they also have high BW Jerseys to sell as well.
Although there have been several farmers taking a look at the robots, especially when one was on show at the recent Waimumu Field Days most showing an interest are looking to convert from sheep and beef.
“To us it’s the best of both worlds,” Joanne said.
“It’s nothing like conventional dairying. It’s more like sheep farming with the added bonus of a regular income.”
