What is the most important unit of production on your dairy? You may think of production in terms of pounds of milk, dollars of sales, or dollars of profit. My Canadian friends would be quick to add kilograms of butterfat. My nutrition consultant friends might talk about energy corrected milk or pounds of combined fat and protein. Those are all good values for the numerator. What’s your denominator? We tend to think of per cow first. A few progressive dairies have added extra robots to improve production per stall. Robotic dairies may think in terms of production per worker. The large investment involved in milking robots leads us to think in terms of production per robot. Production per robot depends on the number of cows, milk yield per cow, milkings per cow, milking speed, refusals, failures, cleaning time, and service time. That’s a long list but it really breaks down to volume and efficiency.
Volume
I measure volume in terms of the number of milkings per day and the pounds of milk per day. Based on my experience, and a composite of several sources, the average robot completes about 140 milkings per day, and produces about 4.500 lbs per day. The range is wide. Higher producing robots compete 170 milkings per day and produce over 6.000 lbs. The best robots don’t go much higher than 170 milkings but they produce over 7,000 lbs per robot.
Let’s look at the math for those higher producing robots. There are 1440 minutes in a day. About 1200 of those minutes are available for milking after washes and idle time. If a milking takes 7 minutes, there will be about 170 milkings in a day. 6,000 lbs divided by 170 milkings is 35 lbs per milking. The 170 milkings will be allocated differently on different farms. It might be 56 cows milking 3 times a day averaging 105 lbs per cow or it might be 65 cows milking 2.6 lbs per day averaging 91 lbs per cow. There is not much margin for error in either scenario. Robots have to operate efficiently to complete 170 milkings per day.
Efficiency
I use milking duration, and incomplete milkings (failures) to measure efficiency. The two are closely related. High incomplete milkings will lead to longer milking duration. Milking duration includes prep and attach time, and an incomplete milking has more attaches, and slower attaches, than a successful milking. An incomplete milking occurs when a cow gives less than the expected yield. As a rule of thumb, incompletes should be less than 5%. It might be a little higher with older robot models, or heifers in training. The farm average is a good place to start, but it is important to evaluate each robot individually. Compare robots to each other and look at trends over time. High incompletes can be caused by robot factors or cow factors. Robots are less likely to have high incompletes when they are clean and well maintained. Cows contribute to high incompletes if udders are dirty and unsinged, teat placement is not robot friendly, or feet don’t stay on the floor.
The Cow Corner weekly report includes performance graphs for each robot, summarized by pen. The graphs include 2 months of weekly averages for yield, milkings, duration, incompletes, and idle time. Click the contact button or call me to discuss a sample report for your farm.
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