Dairy technology giant GEA has launched the world’s first fully automated robotic rotary.

DairyProQ is the only robotic rotary on the market equipped with individual milking robots at every stall.

Farmers Weekly was invited to Germany, where farm manager Eckehard Bloettner and his son Stefan have become one of the first dairy units in Europe to install the DairyProQ.

See also: GEA launches fully automated robot rotary

The Bloettner family have installed a 40-point unit for the 400-cow herd they manage in Teichroda. It milks 200 cows an hour, turning at one revolution every 12 minutes. 

Cows walk into the robot and the automatic milking process begins.

Each stall has its own robotic module.

Back clusters are attached first, followed by the front ones.

The robotic module handles each stage of milking, including teat cup attachment, pre-dipping, pre-milking, milking and post-dipping.

The unit automatically removes and back flushed between milkings to clean the clusters.

The parlour is manned by one member at staff at every milking, who can override the machine and manually put clusters on cows with poor teat attachment. The manual process also offers a fallback against machine failure.

DairyNet records individual cow numbers at each stall and information such as days in-milk, somatic cell count, yield and lactation length, can be transferred to the office computer or a smartphone.