Robotic milking

[Chips]

Fact is huge amounts of farmers can see the advantage to manual attach or even better manual entry of teat locations so why not have it , it doesn't impede those who wish to struggle on and not use it . It would be great for holiday cover not having to worry if a heifer calves while your away . yes it has to learn the coordinates , but the fact is a fidgety heifer will settle once it's attached and so will learn to like milking far quicker than if struggling for half an hour which could prolong her fear for days , many a time I have given up after 20 mins , manually attached , then the heifer calms down, finds the cake and next milking it auto attached . The same goes for sore teats , couple of days ,manual rather than days of failed milkings , better for animal welfare by a country mile .
Delaval came very late to the robot game and over night matched Lely sales , there is only one reason for that .

 

[Sid]

I use manual teach then put the robot in auto.
Only one heifer i have an issue with where the camera doesn't always get high enough due to shallow udder and shortish teats. If it misses her that time it picks her up next time or i manual attach. I don't use it very often but would be irritated if it wasn't there.

 

[Chips]

The heifer I was struggling with I have now auto attached by holding my fingers to be teats , she is only quiet enough for this to work due to having had 3 milkings manually attached . Manually attaching is much harder than needs be due to lely switching off pulsation on arrow screen and not being able to prolong miliking from arrow screen , thus it pulls arm away after so long, there is no way holiday cover would have got her to this stage to now be near enough auto attaching , He would of no doubt brought a portable milker from a neighbour , probably taking hours of time to milk one heifer and not taught the heifer or the robot anything , and all for the sake of a simple software update . Not having this option serves no one , least of all Lely who lose hundreds of sales and those who don't want to use it don't have to so where's the problem .
A farmer not far from here has two Lely's , he has since put a third robot in , a de laval for this very reason . That's okay if you can have two groups , for me grazing I need one group so if I go to two robots the lely will have to go , I wouldn't even consider looking elsewhere from Lely other from this very simple to fix problem

 

[Chips]

We all know the good and bad points of the Lely as they have been discussed on here loads , good points for me Reliability , back up and residual values , Bad points , obviously No.1 no means of manual attach or teach , then running costs of compressed air and the occasional but very damaging risk of the brushes not fully disinfecting .
But what are the bad points on the delaval , there must be some , what makes delaval users think if only they could be like Lely on those bits or what would you change if you could ?
Serious question because I am starting to contemplate the possibility of a change in a year or so if affordable while mine still has some value.
also wondering if a delaval could operate my existing grazing gate and buffer tank or would I need a complete new system ?

 

[Chippy]

A word of warning to anyone that changes brush chemical to something other than Lely's, be prepared for more mastitis! I've had way more than usual this winter and when we swabbed the brushes we found staphylococcus! So this other chemical I've been using wasn't killing everything so I'm back on to Astri L now and also changing brushes once a week and sticking other set in some hypo.

 

[Chips]

A word of warning to anyone that changes brush chemical to something other than Lely's, be prepared for more mastitis! I've had way more than usual this winter and when we swabbed the brushes we found staphylococcus! So this other chemical I've been using wasn't killing everything so I'm back on to Astri L now and also changing brushes once a week and sticking other set in some hypo.

Interesting , what did you use ? Have you swabbed the brushes after going back to Astri-L ? We use deosan active which supposedly is the same strength Paracetic , which given there is only about two places on earth that produce it must be identical to astir-l in it's abilty to kill bugs, in fact the data sheets that list active ingredients are identical , I also use the test strips to test the strength on the brushes and it always goes instantly black . However I have used some cheaper own label paracetic but am now going back to deosan just in case there is a difference

 

[pappuller]

How much does the deosan cost ?

 

[Chips]

How much does the deosan cost ?

Get it through our buying group so not allowed to say but a fraction of astri l .

 

[Chippy]

I'd rather not say which product I used because someone on the forum sells a similar version of it. Will be testing again next week whilst vet is here pd-ing. Another reason I was happy to go back to lelys own chemicals was because of the offer they do when you buy a pallet load. It's about 20% I think and there's not much difference between lelys and this other stuff I've used for years

 

[Chippy]

The only annoying thing about Astri L is it has to come in 20kg drums

 

[pappuller]

Get it through our buying group so not allowed to say but a fraction of astri l .

Cool

 

[Chips]

True to form I have just had another brush disinfection break down Hopefully it only broke sometime during today , but due to being so rushed due to new heifer taking about 30 minutes each milking to get attached and family to visit over Easter I doubt I have been checking often enough , I would swap every single alarm on the robot for one that told you the second those brushes stopped disinfecting , wouldn't care if it stopped milking overnight without alarming , the damage and cost would be far less than going a few days without disinfecting the brushes .

 

[Seasider]

We all know the good and bad points of the Lely as they have been discussed on here loads , good points for me Reliability , back up and residual values , Bad points , obviously No.1 no means of manual attach or teach , then running costs of compressed air and the occasional but very damaging risk of the brushes not fully disinfecting .
But what are the bad points on the delaval , there must be some , what makes delaval users think if only they could be like Lely on those bits or what would you change if you could ?
Serious question because I am starting to contemplate the possibility of a change in a year or so if affordable while mine still has some value.
also wondering if a delaval could operate my existing grazing gate and buffer tank or would I need a complete new system ?

Pretty sure the grazing/ buffer tank would be compatible. The trade off for manual attach on Vms would be more kick offs due to milk pipes which coupled with finding teat twice(clean and milk) in my opinion lead to 20-30 sec longer box time across a typical herd of cows. It is also my belief that due to the more complicated movement of the arm , software issues are greater, leading to updates and reboots which coupled with slow communication between some sectors of Delaval's network can at times be frustrating. To be fair Delaval are working to resolve the above,slowly!

 

[Hanspree]

We all know the good and bad points of the Lely as they have been discussed on here loads , good points for me Reliability , back up and residual values , Bad points , obviously No.1 no means of manual attach or teach , then running costs of compressed air and the occasional but very damaging risk of the brushes not fully disinfecting .
But what are the bad points on the delaval , there must be some , what makes delaval users think if only they could be like Lely on those bits or what would you change if you could ?
Serious question because I am starting to contemplate the possibility of a change in a year or so if affordable while mine still has some value.
also wondering if a delaval could operate my existing grazing gate and buffer tank or would I need a complete new system ?

We like the vms because it is so open and encouraging for the cows to enter it. The manual attach and the agility of the arm has probably saved a lot of cows on the delaval. Ater few years these problems can be bred out of the cows. The problem is there is a lot of wearing/ moving parts on the vms, lots of sensors and rams to detect where the cow is and they are not cheap to replace so you would have to put that cost against culling and replaceing cows that that other machines may struggle with.
The vms has no 2nd hand value now.
As for delaval like seaside says they work very slowly at resolving issues, if at all. Summed them up couple weekends ago when notifier went down worlwide for the alarms and there was nobody to fix it till the Monday.

 

[chas]

Do you not have a modem for the alarms or am I out of date

 

[Chips]

The manual attach and the agility of the arm has probably saved a lot of cows on the delaval. Ater few years these problems can be bred out of the cows. .

That's the thing , you can't breed it out of the cows as there is nothing wrong with the cows ! I wouldn't mind if it were some screw of a cow or wild heifer, but the current heifer that finaly today after 5 days of manually tricking the arm and taking about 15-40 minutes each time has finally fully auto attached has the sort of udder and teat placement that if you saw her in auction you would buy as an ideal robot uddered cow , there is no logic as to when it gets the heifers first time or the 30th time , a lot of the time it cannot see what is Cleary in front of it , once it has got those coordinates it will bang it on each and every time no bother , which is why manual training the arm would be such a good thing . To be honest in 9 years of robot milking there has been no noticeable improvement it the robots ability to see the teats despite every software update being sold as a big step forward and after 9 years of breeding udders for the robot I have every bit as much trouble as I did in the beginning . The fact that they fail to realise is that once it knows teat placements they have an excellent method of attach , prior to that it's exceedingly poor compared to the best teat locator in the world ever and always will be ,which is always present at a cow/heifers first milking and that is of course us ,so why not utilize that resource and make everyone's life so much easier and vastly improve the stress/welfare of new heifers

 

[Seasider]

Do you not have a modem for the alarms or am I out of date

Most older installations do have a modem, as I understand it now you can just rely on notifier to save cost, I have both and always will!

 

[Seasider]

That's the thing , you can't breed it out of the cows as there is nothing wrong with the cows ! I wouldn't mind if it were some screw of a cow or wild heifer, but the current heifer that finaly today after 5 days of manually tricking the arm and taking about 15-40 minutes each time has finally fully auto attached has the sort of udder and teat placement that if you saw her in auction you would buy as an ideal robot uddered cow , there is no logic as to when it gets the heifers first time or the 30th time , a lot of the time it cannot see what is Cleary in front of it , once it has got those coordinates it will bang it on each and every time no bother , which is why manual training the arm would be such a good thing . To be honest in 9 years of robot milking there has been no noticeable improvement it the robots ability to see the teats despite every software update being sold as a big step forward and after 9 years of breeding udders for the robot I have every bit as much trouble as I did in the beginning . The fact that they fail to realise is that once it knows teat placements they have an excellent method of attach , prior to that it's exceedingly poor compared to the best teat locator in the world ever and always will be ,which is always present at a cow/heifers first milking and that is of course us ,so why not utilize that resource and make everyone's life so much easier and vastly improve the stress/welfare of new heifers

I was talking to a Lely employee about 2 months back and he said they are scared of authorising manual attach after a German farmer was crushed by the arm and a cow during a manual attach manoeuvre. Could this happen or just a rumour?

 

[Hanspree]

Do you not have a modem for the alarms or am I out of date

Notifier is ok but you get every alarm as in unexpected low yield/ high yield, little things that aren't too serious to panic over. We have the modem set for stop alarms, then panic!!!!!!!!!

 

[chas]

Notifier is ok but you get every alarm as in unexpected low yield/ high yield, little things that aren't too serious to panic over. We have the modem set for stop alarms, then panic!!!!!!!!!

Oh I see I only have the modem