Tasmanian Crowden and Dornauf families understand robotic milking

But it was not because they were unhappy or disenchanted with the robotic automatic milking system (AMS) technology.

Far from it. It was their deep understanding of how to best use the technology in grazing systems that saw them decide to take a different tack.

One of those dairy farm businesses upgraded their existing AMS operation to a different robotic set up because they saw it as a better fit for their farm system.

The two farming families are savvy business operators who have grown their multi-generational dairy enterprises with a well thought-out approach.

AMS is more complex in grazing systems than in intensive farming systems.

Feed is the key incentive to encourage cow movement through robotic milking machines.

In a grazing system, this requires the farm to be set up in zones while grazing breaks need to be set so cows voluntarily move from one area to another.

As in a conventional dairy, the grazing allocations also need to be managed to maximise pasture growth.

The Crowden family has farmed at Chudleigh, Tas, for five generations since 1915.

Two generations - Marcus and Zed and Marcus's parents Denis and Sheryl - are involved in the day-to-day operations.

The business has been developed to be as self-sufficient as possible, running 1000 dairy animals and 1000 dairy beef, which are turned off at 2-3 years.

The 1000-hectare operation is spread across two properties with a total milking area of 210ha.

The farm has 200ha of irrigation and receives an average annual rainfall of 1200 millimetres.

The home farm milks 420 cows through a conventional 24-a-side double-up American-style dairy and milks 250 cows through a three-stand robotic dairy.

The business employs seven full-time staff, including family, with one labour unit dedicated to the robotic dairy.

The Crowden family installed the robotic system in 2012 to convert a run-off block into a dairy with minimal labour requirements.

The run-off block is five kilometres from the home farm so the new dairy was set up with web cameras and remote computer access to enable monitoring and some management to be performed from the home farm.

The flexibility of the AMS appealed to the Crowdens as it meant they did not have to be at the new dairy farm at set times.

The initial installation included two AMS units and three out-of-parlour feeders. It milked 140 cows in the first season.

It was expanded the following year to include another robot and three more feeders to allow the herd size to be increased and an increasing level of concentrate feeding.

The farm was originally set up to allow three-way grazing.

A feedpad provided a fourth fresh allocation of feed.

The out-of-parlour feeders also helped voluntary cow movement, with cows having access to them after milking.

Marcus told visitors to the farm earlier this year that the breakthrough in getting the robotic farm working well was when they switched to four-way grazing about four to five years after they started.

"It was mind boggling how simple a change it could be - we could milk so many more cows through there," he said.

The cows are offered a new break at 3am, 9am, 3pm and 9pm.

"In the last five years, I wouldn't have changed one thing on the robot farm," he said.

Marcus said when the robotic dairy was installed, they were constrained by the ability to expand the milking platform on the home farm.

"My theory was if I was going to spend a million bucks to build a new dairy to milk the same number of cows, I probably wasn't going to go anywhere forward," he said.

"But if I spent a million bucks to milk 200-odd more cows and built a robot dairy, at least we'd be milking 500 cows."

They have since bought a neighbouring farm.

"If it had come up (for sale) before the robot dairy went in, we might not have built the robot dairy; everything would have changed and this dairy would have been built here," he said.

Buying that neighbouring property was the impetus to upgrade the dairy at the home farm five years ago.

"The old dairy was quite rundown and we were milking 330 cows through that," Marcus said.

"It was a pretty crap old dairy that had been renovated many a time. It wasn't that slow but it wasn't that much fun."

But Marcus decided to go with a conventional dairy rather than an AMS.

"I went to America, and I saw some of the big parlours over there with 5000 cows or 7000 cows, milking 24 hours a day non-stop," he said.

"I didn't like rotaries to start with, and then when I saw those, I thought 'this is the way to go'."

Marcus said his major concern was having a milking system that would allow for growth.

If he wanted to grow the home farm to 600-700 cows, he wasn't sure it would work with robots.

He said he reckoned 600 cows was getting towards the maximum number that would work with robots in a pasture-based system.

"But with the other dairy there's no limit on the number of cows you can milk as long as someone is there to milk them," he said.

The new dairy is stainless steel from floor to roof and has a wide deck, full stall gates and automatic animal identification.

It is ready for individual feeding, but Marcus does not use that.

Marcus said it was enjoyable to milk in and extremely quick.

"We have automatic gates that open at 5.30am, cups on at six and I am home by eight in the morning," he said.

It took about 50-60 seconds for all 24 cows to be in position.

With two people milking, one starts cupping up at the front, the next person starts cupping up 12 back.

Marcus is planning other developments on the property that will allow growth in cow numbers, including potentially centre-pivot irrigation.

He is also increasing autumn calving to help flatten his supply curve in line with a new processing contract.

The flatter curve also better suits the robot dairy.

All heifers are milked on the home farm with cows then selected to be moved to the robot farm.

Marcus said cows that were more aggressive and at the front of the line in the herringbone were a good fit for the robot farm, as they would chase the feed and so would move through the system more readily.

Teat size and placement was also a selection criteria.

Last year they milked 243 all spring-calving cows through the three robots - but it was too many when all were at peak.

This year they had 150 spring-calving and 80-odd autumn-calving cows on the robot farm, which the system was handling easily.

Marcus said he hoped to get at least another 10 years out of the robots.

In terms of technology, they were now a fair way behind.

"Think of your mobile phone, things have changed a lot," he said.

But the robots were still functioning well.

"They are not as expensive as people think they are to maintain," he said.

The Dornauf family were true pioneers in AMS.

Their Gala farm, just outside of Deloraine, Tas, was the first commercial installation of a DeLaval Automatic Milking Rotary (AMR). The Australian-developed robotic rotary started operating at the farm in 2011.

This multi-generational family run business involves Chris and Lyn and their son Nick and his wife Bek as business partners with all of Chris and Lyn's four sons directly involved in the business.

The family operation was started by Chris's parents who left office jobs in the 1960s to start a 60-cow dairy.

It now comprises four pasture-based dairy farms milking 2300 Holsteins with a centralised calf-rearing operation and five support blocks all within a 10-minute drive of Deloraine.

The family also owns and operates a hospitality business along with the lease out of a berry plantation.

The Dornauf journey with robotic milking began when their DeLaval dealer approached them with a proposal to develop and commercialise its prototype AMR on the Gala farm at Quamby Brook, Tas, which the Dornaufs were converting to dairy.

"The tech was quite in its infancy at the time and realistically was probably a year or two away from being truly ready for a commercial application," Nick told visitors to the farm in February.

"We were up for a challenge, but there were lots of teething issues."

They started milking 250 heifers through the system and slowly built the herd size as the technology allowed.

Nick said the family enjoyed a good relationship with DeLaval developing the AMR from something that was capable of milking only 40 cows an hour to something that was capable of milking 75 cows an hour by the end of the eighth year of operation.

This included switching from three-way grazing to four-way grazing within the first two years of operation.

"The golden rule of robotic farming was three-way grazing and three eight-hour allocations," Nick said.

"But within about the first two years of operating we found significant limitations to that in voluntary pasture-based farming and particularly in a larger herd where you are asking cows to walk a bit further.

"We just felt eight hours was too long, and there was too much pasture quality depletion for the cows who were getting last to the paddock.

"So we decided to have a fresh look at it. We looked at it more from the point of view of how could we allocate grass differently."

The change meant cows were offered four breaks a day and those were open for varying amounts of time, depending on the volume of grass that was available there.

"We get a lot better utilisation and we feel cows perform a lot better," Nick said.

In 2019 the Dornaufs decided to change the robotic system.

The main reason for changing was that the rotary platform wasn't fit for purpose.

The initial installation had used a conventional herringbone rotary platform and it was not suited to the stop/start, 24/7 nature of robotic milking.

The other problem was that with the AMR was there was only one access point into the dairy.

So whenever a cow blocked the entry gates or something else went wrong, the system went from 100 per cent capacity to no capacity.

"And in a system that you are driving to operate 24 hours a day that always had us on a knife edge," Nick said.

"We realised our production goals under the AMR, but we didn't realise a lot of the other secondary, tangible reasons for putting robots in, such as the social impacts and the flexibility within the farming system."

The Dornaufs elected to go with eight of DeLaval's then newly released V300 box-style robotic milkers.

These were installed in a horseshoe shape in the dairy shed.

None of the other robotic milking infrastructure, including the out-of-parlour feeders and yards with smart gates, was changed.

The big point of difference with the V300 units was that they featured a 3D time-of-flight camera.

Nick said this was a game-changer.

It meant any cow with a National Livestock Identification Scheme (NLIS) tag could be introduced to the robot and milked immediately.

"There was no training, no having to guide robot arms under cows and show them where the four teats are, no retraining because of teats," he said.

"That provided a massive point of difference and massive technology leap forward, especially in our seasonal calving systems.

"When we are calving 20-30-40 cows a day, you didn't want to be sitting at the busiest time of the year having to train those cows."

This increased the capacity of robots - not because there were more cows per robot or more milkings per robot - but because it significantly cut the number of failed milkings, which had previously meant a large number of cows were having to be directed to be milked again.

The Dornaufs upgraded a dairy at another of their farms in 2018.

But there they opted for a conventional rotary - a 54-unit DeLaval E100 with a teat-spraying robot.

"Robots aren't suited to every farm nor every farmer nor every system," Nick said.

"So we take every case on its merits and those farms. That farm wasn't suited - its topography and layout - to robotic milking."

Chris said the diversity of systems also helped with the attraction, retention and management of staff across their business.

"We have employees you wouldn't put anywhere near robots, and we've got others who are absolutely suited to that style of system," he said.

Nick said a strength of the Dornauf business was that it capped herd sizes at 600-700 cows.

There were lot of farms milking 1000 to 1500 cows, but looking at that from point of view of employee, it was not great to be sitting in a shed milking 1400 cows.

"I think 600-700 is a nice number," he said.

"You haven't got long walking distances for cows coming to and from the shed, and you've got milking times that are a bit more amenable to staff.

"That's a strength of our system - it's adapted to people, you get a more rounded job and you are not pigeon holed to one task and you are not stuck in the shed."

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