Smart technology is giving dairy farmers greater work-life balance

At one of the stands, they were asked to select their top five time savers in the dairy working day.

They chose well, according to Teagasc advisors, who say that automatic cluster removers, getting contractors to spread all slurry, and using automatic calf feeders together could save about five hours per cow per week during the February to June period.

Automatic cluster removers would offer the greatest time saving benefit, followed by getting contractors to spread all slurry.

Other time saving strategies, such as automatic heat detection aids, and drafting facilities, can reduce the physical intensity of work, and can improve farm health and safety.

Automatic heat detection could remove a bull from the farm. Automatic drafting also adds to safety by reducing interaction with animals in confined spaces.

And the cost of such time-saving does not look so high, when you consider, for example, the farmer's own time costs. If contractors are employed, they generally have more efficient equipment, reducing the time spent at the task, and the farmer has a lower requirement for machinery, therefore machinery running costs and depreciation (which can account for 60% of total machinery costs) are reduced.

Certain technologies such as automatic heat detection aids can also reduce the farmer's mental workload.

There is a wide variety of work practices and technologies available to farmers to reduce labour demand. New ones are always cropping up.

For example, without lifting a finger, you can now get daily weights data for your herd, allowing you to identify rapid or excessive weight loss, and make good nutrition decisions. Positive body weight gain at the right time is a sign things are going well, for example before the breeding season. Weight reports also make choosing dry-off dates easier. You can “dose-to-weight”, which reduces treatment costs, and lessens the risk of residues being found after the withholding period. It also reduces the danger of resistance to doses.

The TruTest Dairy WOW 4000 from Datamars makes it all possible.

Park this weighing platform somewhere along the route cows take in their daily routine, and it will do the rest. It automatically collect weights daily, there's no longer a need to manually weigh the herd. By capturing live-weights without stopping the animal, it can fit into the cow’s daily routine.

Any dirt or muck that builds up on the platform is automatically zeroed out. Mains or solar powered, and engineered for the dairy parlour environment, to stand-up to daily weighing and cleaning procedures, the weighing platform is 8.2 foot and weighs 250 kg.

It sends weight data by 4G, satellite or Wi-Fi options, for immediate feedback when the farmer checks it on his device.

You don’t need to wait until the next scheduled body condition score to know if the feeding strategy is achieving results. You can intervene and make timely adjustments, before yield suffers, due to, for example, excessive weight loss during early lactation. Or you can decide to adjust nutrition to extend the peak milk phase.

Identifying rapid weight loss will assist in identifying sick or lame animals early.

Inventions like the TruTest Dairy WOW 4000 pose the question: will the shortage of workers eventually force dairy farms everywhere to adopt automation?

Just as milking by hand was replaced by buckets, pipelines, parlours, automatic cluster removal, rotary parlours, and eventually robots, will high-tech methods take over the job even more?

Automation started in Europe, with DeLaval's robotic systems introduced in 1997. Now, there are estimated to be more than 35,000 robotic milking units around the world.

Automation goes hand-in-hand with increasing herd size. Very big herds (more than 1,500 cows) use rotary systems that load up to 50 cows at once. About two times more cows can be milked per hour.

Luckily, cows are well suited to automation and to machines that do the work of humans. In fact, an unexpected benefit many farmers discover is that cows are calmer when milked by robots.

They prefer a robotic arm aided by three-dimensional cameras or laser beams to locate a cow’s teats and complete milking in about seven minutes.

Unfortunately, cows can associate humans with negative interactions (like the pets that fear visits to the vet). They like the robotic setups that allow them voluntarily go indoors to be milked, or which directs them to grazing or feeding areas, if the ear-tag tells the system it's not time yet for their next milking.

Research findings have shown using robots allows cows to remain in the herd longer. As for rotary parlours, users find that cows like going around on the platform.

Improved efficiency, labour savings, and calmer cows, but the costs are challenging. And high-tech systems need maintenance.

Hopefully, systems will become more affordable, because they also bring benefits such as a better work-life balance for the farmers and workers, more time to focus on skilled duties, and avoidance of tiring repetitive physical tasks.

In the meantime, Teagasc is advising Irish dairy farmers how to reduce the 63.5 hours per week during February and March, found in Teagasc surveys.

These long working hours increase the risk of ill-health and injury, and deter young people from entering careers in dairy farming.

The more labour-efficient farmers had it down to 51.2 hours, the least efficient worked 70 hours.

Five practices were identified to improve milking labour efficiency, that should be relatively easy to implement.

Along with automatic cluster removers, they were one person milking during mid-lactation; the milker not leaving the pit to feed calves during milking; using a quad or jeep when moving cows to and from milking; and being able to operate cow exit or entry gates from anywhere in the milking pit.

Calf care accounted for 20% of work time in the peak months, contract rearing calves pre-weaning and selling male calves could significantly reduce time input.