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.”
FutureDairy – the project providing dairy farmers with practical innovations to address tomorrow’s challenges – is establishing a Partner Farm and trials in South Australia. Darren and Stephen Berkefeld from Mt Gambier will join three dairy farmers in Victoria as FutureDairy Partner Farms. Most of FutureDairy’s trials are conducted at the Elizabeth Macarthur Agricultural Institute (EMAI), at Camden, NSW.
Most of us plan with a five to 10-year outlook and then get on with our daily business. Dairy farmers will be pleased to hear there‟s a group of researchers, advisers and farmers with an eye on the longer term future. As part of the FutureDairy team, their mission is to find ways to address the challenges dairy farmers are likely to face in the coming 20 years. Led by Professor Bill Fulkerson, at the University of Sydney‟s Camden campus, the project has the backing of the industry with sponsorship from Dairy Australia, NSW DPI and the University of Sydney.