Advice on parlour maintenance for expanding herds

Bigger herds and increased milking frequency can see some parlours operating 20 hours a day and, inevitably, that puts pressure on machinery and people.

Herd expansion necessitates a complete rethink of parlour strategy, including how it is staffed and when the equipment is serviced and tested.

And while it makes financial sense for every dairy farmer to regularly calibrate feeders and review energy tariffs, when a parlour is operating for longer periods that becomes even more important.

See also: 4 ways to improve dairy milking routines

Milking specialist Ian Ohnstad, of The Dairy Group, works with herds averaging 500 head, and a 1,000-cow herd is not unusual, he says, with many of those farms milking three times a day.

Ian offers the following advice on how management practices and parlour setup should adapt as cow numbers grow.

Ian Ohnstad © MAG/Colin Miller

How often should a parlour be serviced?

A number of farms are milking in excess of 20 hours a day, and that really limits the window of opportunity to service the parlour.

Historically, parlours were serviced once a year with perhaps a smaller service at six months, but we have to move away from this slightly outdated measure of time and instead account for the number of hours a parlour has been running.

This shouldn’t be a new concept for farmers because tractors, foragers and other machinery are serviced according to hours on the clock.

Most parlour manufacturers would recommend a small service at 750 hours and a major service every 1,500.

When parlours were running twice a day with fewer cows, those 1,500 hours would come pretty close to an annual service, but if a farm is milking 20 hours in every 24, it hits 1,500 hours within 75 days.

Servicing is vital to avoid breakdowns because if you have a parlour that is running at 85% capacity and you have a major service issue which puts it offline for four or five hours, it can take two or three days to get everything back to where it should be.

Some of the large rotaries can be serviced during milking: seals, meters and pulsators, but not vacuum pumps and milk pumps.

One farm I work with keeps spare pulsators serviced and ready to plug in, so that when the time comes to service a pulsator, they just take it off and pop the serviced one on.

What kind of tests are necessary?

Red Tractor standards for dairy farms require a full ISO static test once a year.

To do that when there are only very narrow gaps between milkings becomes very difficult, so we are now seeing a lot more emphasis on milking time testing instead.

The pulsators can be checked, the vacuum reserve and stability, and how well the regulator or inverter for the variable-speed drive is working.

As a testing service industry, we also have to adapt to the expectations and requirements of dairy farmers. It is incumbent on us to respond and review how we do things.

With milking time testing, we can provide the same service to our farms, but are not interfering with their extremely pressurised busy routine.

How do you prevent milking operator fatigue?

The vast majority of dairy farmers are aware that as milking sessions become longer, operator fatigue sets in.

Most milkers are pretty comfortable standing in a parlour for two or three hours.

However, when the sessions are six or seven hours, employers have to be a bit more imaginative about how they keep people engaged and performing at the end of the session, as well as they do at the beginning, because staff get tired.

Having multi-skilled staff, instead of specialist milkers, is helpful as it allows jobs to be rotated and prevents boredom setting in for people when they are doing the same job for long periods of time.

In rotaries, switching jobs with every group change works well – swapping between teat preparation and attaching clusters.

Another trend that is gaining traction – and will continue to do so – is automatic teat disinfection and preparation systems which are becoming more common on rotaries.

It might be a robot, or some sort of teat spray wand, or deck-mounted teat sprayer. There are numerous methods for applying disinfectants before and after milking.

Automating jobs can take away the monotony for milkers and speed things up when there is a big throughput of cows.

The options are a bit more limited in static parlours, but we are seeing handheld teat preparation brushes emerging in bigger herds – this introduces an element of consistency into the milking routine.

© MAG/Shirley Macmillan

When should in-parlour feeders be calibrated?

Nutritionists recommend that feeders should be calibrated every time there is a feed delivery.

That is best practice. However, even if feeders were calibrated two or three times a year, that would be significantly more than currently happens on most farms.

If you are overfeeding across a big number of cows, there is the high cost of that unnecessary feed. Equally, if cows are being underfed, it can create all sorts of other problems.

Farmers might be looking for very complicated solutions to health and performance issues when they are simply the result of the feeders being incorrectly calibrated.

Why is it important to review energy tariffs?

Whether cow numbers are increasing or not, every dairy farmer should review their electricity tariff, almost on a constant basis.

We are all guilty of signing up for contracts, whether it is for electricity, a mobile phone or insurance and, when those contracts end, we think we are too busy to sort it out and let them roll over.

That can be a very expensive mistake with electricity: we are seeing many farmers still on the tariff they had at the post-Covid peak, despite there now being tariffs on offer that are nearly half the price per kilowatt hour.

They either signed up for a long-term contract, or were just too busy farming and it slipped off their radar.

No farmer should ever be too busy to take the time to study the contract to make sure they are getting the best value for money.

There is so much published information available on kilowatt costs for every 100 litres of milk produced, that dairy farms can benchmark their own power consumption against these figures and, if they are on the high side, take the opportunity to review their use.

In my opinion, anyone who is running a milking parlour and can manage it with their power supply should have a variable-speed vacuum pump and variable-speed milk pump.

They should also be thinking about heat recovery and energy efficient pre-cooling of milk – these should be a given.