Dairyfarmers, Sam and Fleur Tonge ignore the daily weather forecast, as it’s proven to be unreliable and irrelevant to their farming operations. However, detailed weather forecast data available on the internet has become an essential planning tool for both day-to-day farming activities and longer-term farming business decisions.
FutureDairy’s milking staff Shannon Bennett and Terry Osborne quite like milking in a conventional dairy,
but after 18 months working in the automatic milking system (AMS) at Camden, they both say ‘you
couldn’t pay me enough to go back to the old system!’
Dairy farmers frequently ask the FutureDairy team if it’s possible to fit a robot to an existing dairy,
especially a rotary. The concept appeals to those with a relatively new dairy which is still very functional. Automation already available in conventional dairies includes in-shed feeding, automatic cup removal (ACR), teat spraying and
drafting. So is automatic cup attachment (ACA) the next development for conventional dairies?
FutureDairy has announced that brothers Paul and Wayne Clarke and Wayne’s wife and Vicki have become
the project’s case study farmers for northern NSW.
FutureDairy is an industry project aimed at addressing the challenges farmers will face in the coming
twenty years. One of these challenges is increasing feed production with limited land, water and labour
resources.
FutureDairy researcher, Dr Kendra Davis, and her colleagues were pleasantly surprised by the smooth start to the automatic milking system (AMS) at the Elizabeth Macarthur Agricultural Institute, Camden, NSW. “This is a high-tech dairy so we were expecting some teething problems with both the technology and getting the cows used to being milked by robots,” said Dr Davis who was a researcher with the Greenfield Project’s automatic milking system in New Zealand. “The commissioning process was far beyond my expectations and much better than my previous experience.”