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RE: Veggie Thread v2.0 ...all stuff regarding food production
February 22, 2014 at 12:59 am
Oh WOW!
On another thread I posted a video of the 24/7 robotic milking machine where the cows themselves determine when they are milked and have some luxury (cattle variety) thrown in..... Looks like it is coming "DownUnder"
For all you non-Australians, Tasmania is very much liken to.... say The Downs/ Dover area of England.
Quote:PIP COURTNEY, PRESENTER: A few weeks back, we looked at the ambitious plan to turbocharge Tasmania's $340 million dairy industry.
You'll recall DairyTas wants to lift milk production in the state by a whopping 40 per cent over the next five years. This will require thousands more cows, bigger farms and a bit of luck. And another essential ingredient of course is innovation.
This week we take a look at some of those farmers already at the cutting edge.
If the Tasmanian dairy industry is to increase milk production by 40 per cent in just five years, it's going to need 60,000 more of these, 100 more of these and hundreds more of these. The target of increasing milk supply by a massive 370 million litres in such is a short time has been set by industry body DairyTas. Its growth program is called Filling the Factories and is designed to secure the future of the state's four big milk processors.
MARK SMITH, DAIRYTAS: Our target here for 40 per cent more milk, which is pretty well set by the companies and their processing capacity. 350 million litres means more jobs, we need more cows and we definitely need more farm investment.
PIP COURTNEY: The growth spurt's already begun, with several multi-million-dollar farm conversions in non-dairying areas this year. But scale isn't everything. To hit 40 per cent, farmers will have to farm smarter, making more milk from each cow and growing more feed from each hectare of land.
DairyTas says the signs are there Tasmania's farmers are up for the challenge.
MARK SMITH: I think it's a strength of the industry here that some very good innovative dairy farmers and they're in the industry for the long term.
PIP COURTNEY: Several of the state's dairy farmers lead the country in the adoption of new technology, having looked to Europe and New Zealand for an edge. At Deloraine, west of Launceston, all eyes are on the Dornauf family's robots. They were the first commercial operators in Australia to install a fully-automated robotic rotary milking system from Sweden. The spend is big. And Nick Dornauf, who runs it, says the cost is a secret.
NICK DORNAUF, GALA FARM: We've invested in something that hopefully can give us more flexibility in how we manage our farm and hopefully have a better work-life balance long term.
PIP COURTNEY: While Tasmania has enough land and water for dairying to grow, the getting and keeping of staff has been identified as the issue most likely to stymie expansion. Robots are one solution.
NICK DORNAUF: The average dairy farmer's 50, 55, mid-50s. We need to get my generation back into dairy farming and break a few stereotypes of dairy farming in doing that. And hopefully this sort of system can provide a spark for some young people to get them back into the industry. We see this technology as being able to help us attract and retain a higher calibre of staff member.
PIP COURTNEY: They might be attracted by news that 24/7 robots have done away with the notorious and unsociable early-morning milk. Cows here visit the 24-hour dairy when they choose. Apart from needing few if any staff in the dairy, a big upside is a sleep-in.
NICK DORNAUF: Conventionally you have two set times where you have to be on the farm to milk the cows. Here we can come and go as we please and do jobs when they suit us and us dictate how we run the farm rather than the farm dictate to us how we want to live our lives.
PIP COURTNEY: The system isn't confined to the dairy. Its reach extends to the paddock where stock access to grass is strictly controlled.
NICK DORNAUF: We have controlled allocations of food away from the dairy in the paddocks of grass. As cows get hungry, as that break expires, they come back to the dairy, they're rewarded by getting milked and getting a feed of grain and then they then feed off out to the next controlled allocation of grass. So it's a revolving circle of hunger almost - not hunger, but motivation to move around the dairy farm.
PIP COURTNEY: Super-producers which can visit three times a day are producing up to 20 per cent more. The system includes computer-controlled feeders that dispense individually tailored grain rations during milking.
There are labour-saving smart-gates too. They read electronic collars. When a cow is due for milking, she's let in. But greedy ones trying for seconds are sent on their way.
The amount of data collected gives Nick Dornauf more information than he's ever had before. Most impressive are figures on production from each quarter of a cow's udder.
NICK DORNAUF: Not only can it tell us which cow has a problem at any one time, it can say, "9-1-10 left-front we believe has an ailment at the moment."
PIP COURTNEY: How does that help you?
NICK DORNAUF: It allows us to be - to make health decisions for the animal a lot more proactively maybe than what we normally did conventionally. Conventionally we wait for clinical visible signs of an ailment with a cow. Whereas here we're seeing that we can detect abnormalities much more quickly and get on to treating those abnormalities.
PIP COURTNEY: Does that make for better quality milk?
NICK DORNAUF: You'd certainly hope so. And we're hoping that we'll see less drug usage and better cure rates. I think it can make us more proactive dairy farmers rather than reactive dairy farmers. And also really drive per-cow production and per-cow efficiency with the information we're getting with her yields. We can match that with her feed requirements and challenge her with extra supplementary feed as well.
One of the biggest things is learning to trust robots and trust sensors and trust alarms and trust the system, and certainly that's absolutely where we're headed.
PIP COURTNEY: Do the cows get used to it pretty quickly?
NICK DORNAUF: I think we're the stubborn ones in the end. I think the cows thrive upon a system like this and in a lot of us as farmers are the ones that take longer to learn and longer to adapt and longer to change our idea of - our expectations of dairy farming, I suppose.
PIP COURTNEY: For Nick Dornauf an unexpected revelation has been insight into cow behaviour. He didn't realise how clever his 250 girls were.
NICK DORNAUF: She makes decisions for herself, she shows intuition and intelligence and she needs that to drive herself around the system. So, absolutely, they're very intelligent animals that we don't give them credit for.
PIP COURTNEY: This dairy farm is one of five owned by the Dornauf family. Nick Dornauf and his partner Rebecca Tyler aim to increase the herd here from 250 to 600 cows. With five robots taking over the manual labour of milking, they've been freed up to focus on thinking about managing and expanding the operation.
NICK DORNAUF: It's a journey and we're moving further and further down that path every day. We're excited by what we see and we're really confident about what the future holds.
PIP COURTNEY: Another young farmer taking a punt on innovation is Jarrod Smith. He and his father, Lyndon, farm in the state's north-east. It's wet here and hilly. But New Zealand herd houses caught Jarrods attention, offering a solution to big problems they had during a wet spring four years ago.
LYNDON SMITH, DAIRY FARMER: We had cows calving in mud and we lost a lot of calves and some cows and we just couldn't get the cows to walk from the dairy to the paddock and so we decided we'd have to have somewhere where we could calve them in warm and dry conditions and have somewhere where we could get the cows off the pasture when it's wet and muddy. These are the first HerdHomes built outside New Zealand. Each 60 metre-by-metre holds 200 cows and costs $300,000 each. The Smiths say they can see their cows are happier by looking at the milk. Production's up and supply is more consistent.
JARROD SMITH, DAIRY FARMER: On a cold day the HerdHomes'll be eight to 10 degrees warmer inside than out. A lot of that will come from the reduction in wind chill factor. Like, it can be blowing a gale outside; you've only got to take a couple of steps inside the HerdHome and it'll be perfectly calm.
LYNDON SMITH: Then during the winter they'd spend the full night in the shed and then we know where they are first thing next morning and it's dark and cold and wet and raining, we just come and turn the lights on and open the gate and head them straight to the dairy. We haven't got to go bogging a bike round down the wet paddock trying to find them.
PIP COURTNEY: The Smiths usually rear 130 heifer calves - what they need for their dairy. But in the first year with the HerdHomes, higher survival rates resulted in 200 calves. They sold the 70 extras for $1,500 a head.
The houses help with pasture management too. By moving cows off wet paddocks in winter, damage to pasture is minimised, meaning 30 per cent more grass.
Is it more pleasant being a dairy farmer with one of these?
JARROD SMITH: Yes, yes, it just makes feeding them so much easier. You haven't got to pull a tractor and wagon around a boggy paddock. Like, I'll spend every day up here mixing up 10 tonne of silage and won't leave concrete all winter. Saves a lot of wear and tear on machinery, and, yes, saves a lot of phone calls to the neighbour to come and pull me out of a bog hole.
PIP COURTNEY: If they're happier, are you happier?
LYNDON SMITH: Oh, it's made a tremendous difference, with peace of mind. You can have your cows calving in here, you can come up late at night, turn the lights on and just wander through, check them, and then go home and go to bed and go to sleep.
PIP COURTNEY: There's even another upside. The manure is collected and spread on paddocks to grow pasture or maize.
JARROD SMITH: Well each HerdHome holds about 500 cubic metres of effluent, so 500 tonne of effluent is the equivalent of about $20,000 of solid fertiliser. We've got two HerdHomes here, so 40,000-odd we're saving in fertiliser a year.
PIP COURTNEY: They've been surprised with the size and range of the benefits and don't think they've extracted all of them yet.
LYNDON SMITH: We've still got a few things to learn about getting the best out of the production out of the cows. We have found a big improvement, but I think we can improve it still further.
PIP COURTNEY: With the HerdHouses working so well, the Smiths plan on increasing cow numbers by 150. Jarrod Smith and Nick Dornauf are mates, just two of the state's progressive young farmers who see a big future in dairying.
LYNDON SMITH: The younger generation was brought up on computers and they just - it's just become second hand to them. And that's the way farm is going, with technology and the internet and all that sort of thing. So, yes, I'm confident that farming is in good hands.
PIP COURTNEY: On the east coast, dairy farmer and cheese maker John Healey might be a generation ahead, but he's an early adopter of technology too. He's spent a million dollars on robots.
JOHN HEALEY, PYENGANA DAIRY COMPANY: We were one of the first to start on a grass-based grazing system with robots in Australia and we were really looking at trying to harvest the best quality milk possible. And I felt with robots, they do the same thing day-in, day-out. They don't ever have a hangover on Sunday morning, they always turn up to work, they haven't got a temper, they always treat the animal in the same way. So you're going to get reduced stress levels on the cow and we're going to get thorough milking from the machine. So I just felt it was a really good way of getting top quality milk day-in, day-out.
PIP COURTNEY: John Healey doesn't sell all his milk to a processor. He keeps some for the cheese factory. He says the reputation of Pynegana's well-known cheddar and farmhouse milk drove the robot investment.
JOHN HEALEY: The reason that we did it is because we can charge more for our milk from the farm into our cheese factory or into our bottled milk and we can sort of make it work that way.
PIP COURTNEY: He says milk volumes are up 30 per cent. And there are other benefits too.
JOHN HEALEY: Quality's up because of the way the robot goes about its milking process. It cleans with brushes each teat each time that it's milked. It quarter-milks the cows, so if there's a slow quarter on the cow, it'll hold the cups on while ever there's flow there. It doesn't over-milk any quarters because there's little flow metres and it pulls the cups off by cutting the vacuum and then taking the cups off. It also sanitises the teats with the iodine spray and it gets every teat every time. It's because it does everything all of the time that you get that success.
PIP COURTNEY: The cows come in when they want. And after decades of milking conventionally, it took everyone a while to adapt.
JOHN HEALEY: This way we're utilising the cow's brain to let her do what she wants to do. Once you get over the fact that there's a lot of cows just goofing off and being social and things and you let them find their own time to get places, after you've left them for a while and you come back and look, all of a sudden the cows are gone and they've moved down to the paddock and they're grazing, so, you just let them do it.
PIP COURTNEY: John says stress levels with both animals and humans are down.
JOHN HEALEY: We've got many cows now that we can pat and they'll come up and give us a lick and things like that. So the thought process of the cow and the farmer changes. ... It's actually quite exciting to see the relationship change with the farmer, and yeah, we totally think differently about our cows now to what we did.
PIP COURTNEY: Last year, Tasmanian dairy farmer Grant Archer won the National Dairy Farmer of the Year Award. This year, the Frampton family made it two in a row for the state. It's clear the Tasmanians are not resting on their rain-fed, grass-based natural advantages, but looking for every edge they can.
"The Universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest." G'Kar-B5
