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Lacombe, Alberta | I enjoy having a bunch of dairy discussion on NAT so I'll keep replying on a bunch of things. For parlour lets say I milk 80 cows and have a dozen calves. For time spent I was thinking calves is under half hour feeding and cleaning. 15 minutes to clean stalls and get cows in. Fresh group of one side of parlour and the rest all in one group that fit in holding area with crowd gate. 80 cows is 4 turns of parlour at double 10 or 3.5 of double 12 so 1 hour actual milking isn't unheard of. 3 way sort gate sorts fresh, regular and treatment area back out so no changing groups. This leaves shutdown and cleanup. 10 minutes to turn off parlour and clean filter. 15 minutes to clean parlour with firehose or bit less with flush. So say 25 minutes calves, 15 get cows in, 60 milk, 10 shut off and 15 clean is 125 minutes or about 2 hours. Anything seem unrealistic?
Time saved versus robot: say I can milk in 3 hours a day (ignore calves). For robot fetch cows and do stalls twice a day at 15 minutes each time, robot cleaning/filters/etc 30 minutes a day, extra time on computer with reports/checking those cows versus knowing problem cows by milking them 30 minutes, time wasted dealing or checking small problems like twisted hose, alarm on phone 15 minutes. That's 1.75 hours chores or 1.25 hours saved a day or 9 hours a week. I do majority of milkings myself and have high school kid do 9 hours a week of milking that cancels out with robot maintenance versus parlour from above paying for it ($10000 savings would do the 9 hours a week at $21/hour). I could be doing other stuff more than 4 afternoons a week for no cost difference versus robots. There's also the feed savings if you don't think parlour operates cheaper than robot. I'm not very rural so finding help isn't that tough and if I can make it simple enough I can tolerate inexperienced help.
Parabone parlour: I went and milked in a 2 year old double 10 parabone retrofit last night. It was definitely an improvement over having a double 6 before in same space but it wasn't as good as I hoped. Had to count 10 cows coming in every time or else they would get too many in and try back them up which didn't work so one time had to let extra cow go and catch it again. Older cows were harder to milk with front teats further away than in a parallel or in herringbone from side. It wasn't bad but the Germania parlour was nicer to milk in just so big.
If anyone else has comments on my logic let me know. I was planning on robots but it doesn't seem to be the best economic decision here but I can be convinced otherwise. All this is based on a big, fast parlour with simple groups so minimal wasted time except cleaning it because its big. Has to be simple to load without help and has ID, meters, conductivity, activity, sort gate, crowd gate to be equivalent to a robot for information gathered. The used Germania parlour has all this so I'm wondering what I'm missing. Thanks for reading all this. | |
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New milking parlour questions
