With dairy farmers currently planning summer crops for their herds, regular maize growers will be thinking hard about whether it suits this season with lower milk prices and the possibility of limited irrigation water.
FutureDairy’s Professor Yani Garci has five tips for achieving a profitable maize crop this season.
NSW DPI’s Development Officer for Robotic Milking Systems, NIcolas Lyons, talks about robotic milking systems and precision technology in the Australian Dairy Industry. The video features some great drone footage.
When it comes to equipment in robotic dairies, bigger is not always better, as FutureDairy energy audits showed.
Gabriel Hakim, AgVet Projects, undertook energy assessments on 10 farms with automatic milking systems (AMS).
One of his key findings was that most AMS dairies were operating with equipment that was oversized for the needs of automatic milking, resulting in unnecessary electricity consumption.
“Rural Australia is being progressively hollowed out of its people. Will it be reduced to a vast mechanised place of scant human habitation?” Read the recent article by Paul Daley from The Guardian.
Better use can be made of basic data already being collected on-farm, according to a veterinary researcher. Cameron Clark, of the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Sydney, says as the average herd size has increased, the cost of data collection has fallen meaning there is more information available.