GRUNTHAL, Man. – If you had your eyes closed, you might not realize you’re surrounded by 250 cows.
You’d hear a lot of other sounds such as robot milkers moving, a scraper crawling along the barn floor, fans whirring and the occasional roar as the feeding system’s belt feeders kick in.
And that’s the way dairy barn owner David Wiens and the designers of this automated barn want it, because quiet cows are happy cows.
“When we used to come into the barn, they’d make a lot more noise,” said Wiens as he toured a group of Canadian and U.S. producers through his new $2.8 million barn.
Read Also
Dennis Laycraft to be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame
Dennis Laycraft, a champion for the beef industry, will be inducted into the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame this fall.
The barn contains an automated feeding system, automated gates that only open for the cows that need to be milked and four milking robots. The manure is also automatically scraped and removed and dumped in a 36 x 8.5 metre slurrry storage tank.
Most of the cost of the new barn was for the sophisticated feeding system and the other high-tech components.
It wasn’t an easy cost to swallow, but Wiens said it’s allowed him to cut down on labour, run his farm with more flexibility and increase per cow milk production.
“It has to be managed, but it’s managed differently.”
“It’s taken a lot of the manual work out of the dairy. You don’t have to be here at 6 a.m. and at 6 p.m. If we’re in the field and we’re still cutting haylage at five in the afternoon, we don’t have to stop.”
Some producers have been skeptical of such systems, worrying that loading feedstuffs into the mixer would take too much work and the output would be too slow. By having it entirely automated, the only labour required on the feeding end is a morning loosening of any material from the silos that has settled. After that it runs automatically all day.
Smart panel in control
The automated feeding system operates out of four silos, which contain alfalfa haylage, corn silage, alfalfa hay, corn grain, wheat distillers grain and minerals. A smart panel controls the unloading of each silo at set rates so that diets can be exact.
System supplier Gordon Ross of United Livestock Systems said if one of the four unloaders overdoes an ingredient by even half a pound, the next batch will compensate.
“That’s what we call precision feeding in dairy cows,” said Ross.
“It allows you to have all this done with no manual supervision whatsoever.”
During the tour, the system automatically started up and soon the cows were getting a shower of feed dumped down in front of their stalls.
“They won’t even move,” said Wiens. “They love it.”
The robotic milking is reliable and has other advantages. The system can run 24 hours a day, so cows can get to it when they need milking, rather than awaiting the human-scheduled milkings of a conventional barn.
A report is produced for each cow every day, so problems are usually spotted early.
“The minute we come in this door, we know what the situation is,” said Wiens. “We’re not walking through here in general just looking to see if a cow doesn’t look right.”
A back-up system ensures that the complex system doesn’t go down, but Wiens admitted he needs the system to be operating at near full production all the time.
“With four milking units and 250 cows, you can’t have a lot of down time,” said Wiens.
The cows and the software run the system. A cow that hasn’t been milked for six hours will be allowed through the gates to the robots. One that doesn’t need to be milked will be turned back.
After milking, the cow is allowed back into another feed area. If the cow tries to leave the queue for the milkers, she won’t be allowed through that gate.
The tour included officials from the companies that provide various elements of the system, and they pointed out that a system like this needs to be integrated from start to finish to be most efficient.
So all the suppliers have learned to work together to make their components match.
Wiens said the system still requires human oversight, but it’s the higher brain functions that are now needed, not the brawn of the past.
“The cows still have to be managed. This system doesn’t mean we can lock the doors and walk away and come in once in a while and see how things are looking.”
