John and Clare Cotton, owners of Retreat Creek, Victoria have decided to retire from dairy farming and are preparing for the sale or lease of their farm and herd. In the meantime they will revert to a traditional grazing/feeding farm system and batch milk their cows in their existing rotary.
FutureDairy has launched a web-based resource on automatic milking systems (AMS) for large herds.
Project Leader Associate Professor Kendra Kerrisk said the resource was designed for people at various stages in the robotic milking journey.
Automatic milking is most clearly associated with herds based in barns. Less work has been done with pasture-
based herds, at least until now.
FutureDairy researchers have discovered that cows can be trained to respond to sound, opening up
possibilities for teaching cows to come to the dairy in response to a particular call.
Kim McKean, Manager of the University of Sydney’s dairy operation, has received the prestigious Dairy Science Award from the Dairy Research Foundation in recognition of nearly 50 years’ service to the industry through a variety of roles at the University of Sydney.
She’d be a dairy farmer’s dream: a cow that yields more milk from fewer milking sessions. This is just the cow that the FutureDairy team has been looking for…
Dairy’s top young researchers are tackling some of the big challenges likely to face the industry in the coming years including climate change, fertilisers and animal health and welfare. These were the topics of the three place-getters in the 2015 Emerging Scientists’ program which was run in conjunction with the University of Sydney’s Dairy Research Foundation annual symposium. Sponsored by Howard Australia, the program involved the students preparing a written paper and presenting their findings to symposium delegates.
With 34 robotic dairies now operating in Australia and several more under construction, the FutureDairy team is often asked whether there’s any difference in raising replacements for robotic milking.
Automatic fetching technologies on the horizon may allow farmers with automatic milking systems (AMS) to increase the number of milking’s that occur overnight.
Every dairy farmer knows that some paddocks are more productive than others but Future Dairy researchers were staggered to find the average difference between the best and worst paddocks is 100%!