Farmer Focus: Parlour gadgets installed just before dry-off
© Richard Stanton Happy new year, and I hope Santa managed to call in with big presents.
As usual, alcohol and food intakes have been high, and a more relaxed approach to life is the norm for now. It’s a time to recharge my batteries.
All staff are on reduced hours, giving people time to spend with family over the festive period.
We dried off the last of the cows in mid-December. All the barrens have left, leaving only pregnant cows and housed heifers on hay. Everything’s been dry cow-bolused, fluked and wormed.
See also: How to reduce mastitis ahead of spring calving
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We switch to hay four days before drying off batches of cows – we find this works well in drying them up and avoids milk on the bedding.
They would have been doing more than 10 litres a day for the two weeks before drying off.
Butterfat would have been 6% and protein 4.5%, which is pretty good. Their body condition was good, too.
My brother, Irfon, and I risked using a non-antibiotic teat sealant on the in-calf heifers, which can be dangerous, as the heifers are not used to their teats being handled.
However, since adopting this procedure five or six years ago, our mastitis rate in down-calving heifers has almost been eradicated, so hopefully we will get the same results again.
Machinery has all been washed, serviced, oil sprayed and put away for winter. I am quite fussy in insisting that everything is put away ready to be used again next year.
We seem to have a bit of “shiny metal disease”, as I tend to upgrade machinery before it depreciates too much.
The part-exchange deal depends on warranty length, 0% finance options and value for money.
We have milked for 23 years without automatic cluster removal, but we now have MilktechNZ equipment (electronic cup removers) with yield monitoring installed.
I had hoped this would have been completed by October so we could sort out teething problems before the spring.
However, as with most projects where I have no input on the job, I find it never gets done on time.
On the upside, based on the couple of weeks since we had them installed, they seem to be easy to operate, and I’m impressed with the amount of technology we can alter on the app to fine-tune them.