lazy farmer
Member
- Location
- som/dor border
Is it me or does the cow on the right have design flaws ?!
Old milking parlours for small herds
- Thread starter Swaley
- Start date
- Location
- Wormingford, Essex
They all have flaws, that's how I ended up with them!
lazy farmer
Member
- Location
- som/dor border
Ha. It wasn’t meant as a criticism I was wondering whether it was an optical illusion!
- Location
- Wormingford, Essex
If you're looking at her hip, then yes, it's an optical illusion. Rowena is a good cow, her flaw was she took a disliking to the robot milker on the previous farm and liked to give it a good kicking.
- Location
- somerset
that's jerseys for you.
- Location
- Wormingford, Essex
That's a flaw they all share, Jersey temperament.
- Location
- somerset
we have one, ultra quiet, who 'presents' which bit she wants scratched, my 3 yr old g daughter was here, wanting to see the calves, then the cows, thought, this will be good, bitch looked at us, and walked away, luckily another one came up, and she stroked that one. Had a chap in this week, to buy some cows, he seriously complimented us, on how quiet our cows were.
- Location
- Cheshire
Look at those cows!! Bugger the parlour! Proper British Fresians, a pleasure too look at, wish I could source fresian bull calves out of cows like those all the time!View attachment 946975View attachment 946976View attachment 946977View attachment 946978I’ve put these up before so you may have seen them
Thanks, keep trying to improve them
- Location
- somerset
I hope some 'wanabee' dairy youngsters have read this thread, my posts have had 40+ likes, which clearly shows you do NOT need a multi thousand £ parlour, to milk cows, all the mags tend to show cow palaces, implying that's the only way, well it clearly isn't. We collected old parlours for £0, when we moved to a h/b, we had enough bits to do it, actually more than enough, as our fitter only charged us for new bits, he took as many spare parts, as he wanted, for his labour ! Since then, we have added/replaced bits, as and when we found them, though old alfa laval auto clusters are getting very scarce.
All i hope, is that it gives some hope, and encouragement to any aspiring person, wanting to milk, but put off by others, ridiculing the thought, as @Jdunn55 said, plenty of doom and gloom merchants out there, spreading their gospel. Which, looking at some of the money spent, putting in new cow palaces, covering the cost of those, would be doom and gloom. We rent, with 0 money from l/lords, we were not prepared to invest in a cow palace, so with a mix of csf money, and hard work, we designed, and built, all our cow cubicle housing from scratch, the last cubicle building, which we put up years ago, as a barn, converted to cubs, at £75 cow place, i read, with horror, farmers talking £1500 to £2000, per cow place, how can you justify that cost.
To make money out of milking, you have to make the system as simple as you can, spr grazing is one answer, but number of cows required, is difficult to get, if starting up, top quality bale silage, cake in parlour, cannot be beaten for cost. My friends son works for lely servicing robots, some of those farms he visits, are still quality round bales in racks, cake in robot, or OFP feeders, with cows av over 11,000 litres, in 'old' cubicles, says it all.
All i hope, is that it gives some hope, and encouragement to any aspiring person, wanting to milk, but put off by others, ridiculing the thought, as @Jdunn55 said, plenty of doom and gloom merchants out there, spreading their gospel. Which, looking at some of the money spent, putting in new cow palaces, covering the cost of those, would be doom and gloom. We rent, with 0 money from l/lords, we were not prepared to invest in a cow palace, so with a mix of csf money, and hard work, we designed, and built, all our cow cubicle housing from scratch, the last cubicle building, which we put up years ago, as a barn, converted to cubs, at £75 cow place, i read, with horror, farmers talking £1500 to £2000, per cow place, how can you justify that cost.
To make money out of milking, you have to make the system as simple as you can, spr grazing is one answer, but number of cows required, is difficult to get, if starting up, top quality bale silage, cake in parlour, cannot be beaten for cost. My friends son works for lely servicing robots, some of those farms he visits, are still quality round bales in racks, cake in robot, or OFP feeders, with cows av over 11,000 litres, in 'old' cubicles, says it all.
Friesianfan
Member
- Location
- Cornwall
I’ve got some for sale!
- Location
- Lancashire/Gloucestershire
Very inspiring thread! As a young "wannabe", it's good to see other people are doing it in very simple but effective ways.
Please keep pictures coming, it's very nice to see that we don't have to be stood in a pit for 8 hours or investing millions just to get on the ladder or to get a slice of the few pence per litre.
Please keep pictures coming, it's very nice to see that we don't have to be stood in a pit for 8 hours or investing millions just to get on the ladder or to get a slice of the few pence per litre.
We got an hybrid type shipped/abrest cow still have to back out. Decided after last year of not being able to stand up right due to the celling being 6ft and me being 6ft2. And shovelling all the cake from a loft. So doubled up the units and added feeders, meters, acr and head yokes to get big of chaining round the neck.
Spot on built our cubicle shed out of telegraph poles and crash barrier. Secondhand roof sheets kerb stones rescued from tippings we were having. Bought some unfashionable newton rigg cubicles at a sale never been used cost under 3 quid each . ratchet strap head rail and sand beds .
All concreting done with a belle mixer
What Alfa clusters are you using?
We've gone to de Laval harmony clusters (2nd hand of course) liners wear out never split
Nice setup any chance of some pics of the yokes as I would like to do the same
Don't need a very big step to save your back and the cows soon get used to backing out
Tidy set up that
I bought some old head yoke off facebook and cut them up and fabricated them to fit.
- Location
- Cheshire
Where in the country are you?
How much time has that cut off compared to tying up and caking by hand
I don’t know it’s hard to tell tbh. We where chaining round the neck. When we put this in we went to chaining round the rump but didn’t like that they would poo on the chains ect and things where getting dirtier. So tried the head yoke and won’t go back. Yoke them selves up and you can start preparing them straight away. Pre dip and wipe we can milk 50-60 an hour 10 units