Dairy partnership plans for the future with robots

"Ten years ago, Warren [Jacobs] and I were sitting talking about the concept of amalgamating our two farms as a partnership, to help get me into the industry and for Warren to one day retire," Perrin Hicks said.

"Asher [Jacobs] was still at university, but was expected to eventually come on as a partner in the business, and today he's working in well as a third partner."

The collaboration comprises about 2300 head of cattle (1000-plus cows and calves) on more than 1000 hectares at Tooperang, near Mount Compass.

Asher's return to the farm also prompted a review of the dairy operations, with an upgrade of their 20-aside swingover herringbone at their Whispering Pines property on the list.

"We were keen to expand, but we were limited to 400 cows in the yards, so five years ago we started considering robots as a way of expanding what we had," Perrin said.

"We were also looking at improving our work/life balance.

"Labour had always been a juggle, between sick and holiday leave, plus weekend work.

"We will always need employees, because of the size of our operation, but what once took one employee eight hours to do in the old dairy, now takes about an hour with the robots, which milk 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"The farm was also set up well to facilitate robots - so it was a no-brainer."

A year ago, Perrin said they started planning to reconfigure the Whispering Pines property into an 'ABC' pasture management system, which sees cows move through three grazing areas over a 24-hour period.

Perrin said they had a fourth paddock and a feed pad as well, "just in case".

"The system uses drafting gates to distribute the cows onto three different grazing areas at different times of the day - about eight hours apart," he said.

"The aim is to get the cows to move 2-3 times, always onto fresh grass.

"We still have to push some cows out of the paddock, as they want to stay on grass.

"But we're hoping the grain is an incentive to get them into the robot, and the other incentive to move is to get new grass.

"It has taken them a while to work out the grazing side of the system, but they should get better and better as time goes on."

About two months ago, the eight Lely robots were installed.

They were drawn to the Lely brand as they "wanted a whole farm system, which included collars".

"We also liked the app, which tells you a variety of milk qualities, and will highlight if a cow might be sick," Perrin said.

"The robots then dump the milk if it's contaminated, plus it calls you if there are any issues.

"That's the best thing about the system is that it looks after the cows for us, better than we can.

"Instead of binge feeding morning and night, we have the capacity to get more feed into them across the day

"And the cows are happier because they can milk themselves when they want to, at any time of the day."

Perrin said any health issues were also picked up much earlier through the milk quality, while voluntary milking reduced feet and mastitis problems.

"We're hoping we won't have as many problems as we used to, especially because we're not moving them in big groups," he said.

"The cows are often coming in single file, walking where they want to walk, instead of being pushed as a big group, which has also less impact on the laneways too.

"We are doing the right thing by our cows by having these robots."

Perrin said they were also seeing production increases as the cows were milking themselves more than twice a day.

"We're averaging about 2.5 milkings a day," he said.

Asher said the cows were still sticking to three set milking times throughout the day - at dawn, just after lunch and around 11pm at night.

"We've had to pull a few tricks to try and split the herd up a little bit, so they weren't all milking at the same time," Perrin said.

"But we are finally starting to see the odd cows come in between those busy times and we're hoping that will grow to more and more to stretch it out."

Asher said the 2-3 weeks pre-training of the cows to go through the robots was an important step.

"We were milking them the conventional way and then walking them through the robots, eventually giving them some feed in there," he said.

"By the second and third day, once they knew they were getting fed, they were a lot calmer.

"We've had to make a few edits to the yards, and we're still running around trying to promote cow flow.

"But we maybe only have about 1-2 per cent of cows now that need guidance."

The robots came online full time about a fortnight ago, currently milking up to 410 cows.

The aim is to eventually get up to milking 500 cows over the next year, mainly Friesians.

"We haven't had problems with the Jerseys per say, but the Friesians just fit the robot better with their size," Asher said.

"There's less ability to move around in the robot if they wanted to play up.

"We won't cull our Jerseys though, we will just move them to our conventional dairy on the other farm."

They have also been genomically testing their herd for the past five years, with the past few bulls selected on 'Robot Ready' traits.

"Many companies have introduced a Robot Ready cow - which has good teat placement, specific udder slope, can stand in a robot and get cups on quick, and milking speed," Perrin said.

"Milking speed is important as the less time a cow spends in the robot, the more cows you can milk."

Perrin said they were still "tweaking" the robot dairy precinct, which included decommissioning their old herringbone dairy and turning the area into a draft yard and treatment facility with the crush.

They had also thought about upgrading the other dairy on-farm - Misty Downs - "one day", but certainly not in the short-term.

"But robots are the future, and they're fantastic," Perrin said.