“You go down to the calf shed and the calves aren’t bellowing when they see you, wanting to be fed,” Linda Clement says.
Linda and her husband, Paul, calve 500 Friesian and Friesian-cross cows on 175ha effective and a neighbouring 100ha runoff on the banks of the Waikaia River near Riversdale in Southland.
Production last season was 222,000kg milksolids (MS) from about 485 cows with 200 tonnes of grain pellets and some molasses added to the system.
Each year they raise about 150 calves but since 2012, Linda’s had robotic calf feeders do the hard work.
“In the early years I was bucketing milk and I was getting tendonitis in my arms and even later when we were more set up it was still hard work – getting calves to feed and making sure they all had the right amount and weren’t pushing each other off the teats.”
The couple came from Taranaki in 1992 to sharemilk on a Tasman Agriculture farm near Gore before buying the Waikaia farm in 1995 and converting it from sheep.
“After so many years raising calves I was thinking I was over this but I didn’t want to leave it to someone else to do,” Linda said.
“I was the one on the farm who had the time and it takes time to rear calves well.”
Peter McKerchar, of JJ in Gore, showed the couple robotic calf feeding at Alistair and Jossane Megaw’s farm near Tapanui in West Otago and they were hooked. About $70,000 later and the farm’s former covered sheep yards were converted ready for the next spring.
“We put in four feeders which means we can feed up to 200 calves and there was some concrete work and a hot water cylinder and a vat for the milk,” Paul said.
They use colostrum and later in the season whole milk, although the system will also use milk powder, mixing it as needed, so there are no extra costs each year apart from electricity.
‘We milk the colostrum cows in the afternoon but let the bobbies out into the yard first to feed off the cows. That way we never have to teach them to drink off a feeder.’
The Clements are old-fashioned when it comes to calving. Calves are left on their mothers between one and two days, depending what time of the day they are born. Cows and calves are removed from the herd and brought on to clean pasture each morning, then the next day are moved into another paddock closer to the dairy.
“We don’t get any milk fever in the cows and the calves come into the shed nice and clean and strong and their navels are dry,” Paul said.
Linda teaches them to suckle on a conventional feeder the next morning, then that afternoon introduces them to the Lely Calm.
“The majority of them take to it straight away,” she said.
The system identifies the calf through the EID/NAIT ear tag and, if it’s due to feed, warms and releases the allocated amount of milk. Once the calf is finished the teat is removed and the calf backs out of the space letting any waiting calves in.
A screen shows which calves have not fed and need attention.
“You still have to go down to the shed each day but it’s a nice job now. There’s no heavy work and you can spend the time with the calves,” Linda said.
“I like how it warms the milk. Calves are babies and need looking after, especially in Southland.
“And they’re happy. They’re not fighting each other to get fed or knocking each other off teats and if there’s a slow feeder it can take all the time it wants to get the milk.”
Their lower order sharemilkers Doug and Emma McLeod have noticed the difference this year as the farm’s first robotic-fed calves are now in the milking herd.
A calf feeds in the Lely Calm.
“They say they go on to the rotary platform really well,” Paul said. “As calves they got used to being in a confined space plus we have grain feeding on the platform so they are used to being fed as well.”
Linda is adamant a good calf rearer will do just as good a job as the robotic feeder.
Paul said: “But we’re trying to slowly step away from farming and let our sharemilkers do the work – but we still want to be involved but don’t want to kill ourselves in the process, so the robotic calf feeder lets us do that.”
In the pens, calves have access to water, grain and hay and after a few weeks the sides of the shed are opened and they can wander out on to pasture.
Health issues still have to be watched out for, but scours due to overfeeding are no longer a worry.
Feeding rates are programmed into the computer, increasing as the calf grows, then for the final week tapering off until weaning at 60 days.
“For the first 10 days they get four litres a day which then builds up to six litres. They can’t get more than two litres each feed but they may only come in for only a litre if that’s all they want.
“You can control it all – if you want, a particular calf can get more or you can delay weaning because the weather is bad.”
The system has an automatic wash program which it does once a day, and when it is no longer needed at weaning it goes through a final wash.
“That’s it. There’s nothing else,” Paul said. “The team from the Lely Centre in Invercargill comes out once a year to service it and if anything goes wrong they’re on call, but we haven’t had any major problems. The only thing would be if the power goes out and then we would just have to wait for it to come back on. At the worst we may have to feed them the old way.”
The Clements AI for four weeks and raise all their AI heifer calves using the Lely Calm plus a few bulls for charity. Bobbies are kept in a shed next to the dairy yard well away.
“We only milk once a day, in the morning for the first three to four weeks of calving, depending on the weather. It means everyone goes home on time in the afternoon and everyone stays happy,” Paul said.
“We milk the colostrum cows in the afternoon but let the bobbies out into the yard first to feed off the cows. That way we never have to teach them to drink off a feeder.
“We have to watch them though, or they drink too much and get crook – not a problem we have to worry about with the heifer calves and the robotic feeders.”
