How to improve milking efficiency and cow welfare
© Tim Scrivener Improving milking efficiency makes sense for practical management benefits, financial incentives and animal health and welfare.
Greater efficiency will allow smaller herds to spend less time milking, while larger herds may be able to milk more cows in the available time.
This can help in management of labour and dilution of variable costs, improving staff retention and profitability.
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Animal health and welfare has a circular relationship with milking efficiency. Most elements of the milking process that increase milking speed will also improve health and welfare.
The healthier the herd, the fewer cows there are slowing milking by being under treatment.
Health improvements are partly due to better udder health and partly because cows spend less time stood on concrete away from feed.
Measuring milking efficiency
Different metrics are useful for different farm situations, and it is important to choose the appropriate measure.
Cows an hour:
- Most important for large herds where staff are running out of hours in the day for milking
- Significantly affected by yield, so often misused in comparing performance between herds.
Milk/hour:
- The closest reflection of how profitable your milking is, balancing milk harvested against your running costs
- Of limited use for comparing different farms as it is closely related to parlour size.
Milk/stall an hour:
- A reliable way of checking you are getting the most out of your milking machine, regardless of parlour size, making it useful for benchmarking herds
- For swing-over parlours, with twice as many stalls as milking units, slightly different targets for this metric are needed.
Various other metrics such as milk/labour unit an hour or milking margin/hour can be used to answer specific questions when considering changing staffing numbers or costing new infrastructure.
Milking efficiency targets
For each metric, we will apply different targets depending on the farm situation. This allows us to make sure the goal is ambitious, but achievable.
For example, 130 cows an hour would be a reasonable target for a herringbone parlour, but would be very poor for a rotary setup where we may expect more than 250 cows an hour.
Guidelines for milking efficiency
Advance Milking has collected data from farms across the UK to establish the range in performance figures.
These graphs show the distribution of performance across UK herds of all types and milking systems.
- The green box shows the range of performance of the middle 50% of herds.
- The X within the box shows the “mean” average performance.
- The lines above and below the boxes show the range of performance for the top 25% and bottom 25% of herds.
- The green dots are “outlier” farms.
Targets should be farm specific, but general guidelines can be based on the top 25% of the range in each metric:
- Cows an hour: 130 in herringbone and rapid-exit parlours; 270 in rotary parlours
- Milk/hour: 1,500kg in herringbone and rapid exit parlours; 3,500kg in rotary parlours
- Milk/stall an hour: 40kg in swing-over parlours; 55kg in double-up; 65kg in rotary setups.
Improving milking efficiency
Milking efficiency is influenced by a combination of interacting factors.
Milking routine, udder health performance, milk yield, staffing rate, parlour size and design and milking machine settings can all be altered to improve efficiency.
We can identify which areas are limiting efficiency by looking at more performance figures.
In herringbone and rapid exit parlours, the ratio of milking to non-milking time highlights whether more gains will come from adjusting milking machine settings or the routine.
In rotary parlours, we can look at occupancy rates, stoppages and second turns to show which factors are reducing efficiency.
Video footage is a great way of performing “time and motion” analysis of the milking process and dynamic testing of the milking machine demonstrates how efficient the unit-on period is.
Opportunities to increase efficiency will vary between herds, but the most common source of improvement is altering the automatic cluster removal (ACR) settings to give an earlier detachment.
Advance Milking has demonstrated that, on average, increasing the milk flow rate that triggers the ACRs above 300ml/min (a common default setting) results in an additional 9.4kg of milk/stall an hour.
This improvement is further enhanced by optimising stimulation of milk let-down.
Milking speed in context
When making changes, we always need to consider the long-term effects.
Cutting corners in milking routine may speed up milking today but, if that results in higher mastitis rates, milking is going to be slower and harder work in the future.
Similarly, adjusting the machine settings to achieve high milking speed will only improve efficiency if it is done safely, with no long-term changes in teat health.
A useful “quality control” metric is the amount of non-saleable milk. If more than 1% of total milk produced is being discarded, then however fast your milking is, it cannot be considered efficient.
The same applies to missed milk quality bonuses – none of the current UK contracts has such strict requirements that it is not cost-effective to meet them and maximise the amount you are getting paid for your product.