April 2010 edition
Awesome automation innovations
The Australian dairy industry is abuzz with talk of robotic or automatic milking. But many other dairy farming tasks have the potential to be automated. And you won’t necessarily need a robotic milking unit to take advantage of some of these innovations.
Automation innovations generally fall within three main areas:
- Automation of some or all of milking-related tasks.
- the cow’s body to make more accurate decisions about nutrition and health.
- Automation of feeding systems and tasks involving heavy labour.
The benefits offered by automation are far reaching: improved profitability, milk quality, lifestyle and animal welfare.
Obviously automation saves time, but it also has the potential to provide information that we haven’t had in the past. This information will enable dairy managers to be proactive rather than reactive, especially in terms of nutrition, reproduction and animal health. Imagine a dairy farm where technology takes care of heat detection, mastitis prevention and detection, milking duties, body condition scoring and monitoring of heat stress and pregnancy.
The following products are already on the market overseas or on trial prior to commercial release:
- Automatic gates that can be set to open and shut or draft in different directions and at pre-set times, using many different criteria such as number of cows already drafted, day of the week or individual cow’s milking history.
- Robotic fencing that moves break fences at pre-set times and pre-set distances.
- A robot that accurately applies teat spray on rotary platforms, either pre or post milking or both.
- Portable milking robots that can be moved around the farm, saving the cows from walking to the dairy.
- A robotic milking unit that takes daily milk samples which can be analysed on-site to identify cows losing body condition, on heat, pregnant, with anoestrus, mastitis infections, cystic ovaries, or other illnesses.
- Sensors in the cow’s rumen that monitor feed intake, energy balance (affecting liveweight changes), heat stress levels and other indicators of nutritional or health status; with an automatic message sent to a computer to alert when treatments are required or the ration needs adjusting.
- A GPS device attached to cows’ collars that monitors activity as an indicator of oestrus.
- Remote monitoring of farm performance, cow health, milk production and composition to allow you to alert farm staff to potential problems early, even when you are absent from the property.
- Robots that perform tasks previously involving strenuous labour or heavy lifting.
- A sensor that monitors silage fermentation process to track feed quality.
- Milking machines that automatically advise the service company of faults and parts needed and when repairs and maintenance are due.
Welcome to the world of precision farming! The term refers to innovations that allow more precise farming without the need for more labour. Some of the innovations listed will be ‘add ons’ to automatic milking systems but others will be suited to conventional farms.
For information from FutureDairy contact: (02) 9351-1631 or www.futuredairy.com.au
