Scholsey
Member
- Location
- Herefordshire
Robotic milking
- Thread starter newholland
- Start date
On a farm down south. It's one of the last to be made.
s line
Member
- Location
- Gloucestershire uk
Fair play. That was a good find. Was it through a dealer or private?
Tim Gibson
jockthethistle
Member
PRICE .... jtt
- Location
- North yorks
Tim had a used one the other week that he wanted 55k for
- Location
- Eastern Ontario Canada
I was wrong. The local rinse after a milk separation doesn't blow out first. Pushed out with the rinse water.
It was a third less than the farmer paid for it 4 years ago
pine_guy
Member
- Location
- North Cumbria
So how do you guys with robots, address scraping out and beading cubicles down when the cows are there all the time? I assume you use automatic scrapers. Are you bedding down by hand with sawdust?
- Location
- South Molton
loose housed, scrap feed passage when shut in bedding, feed them then they all move in for fresh feed and bed up.
DocPhil001
Member
- Location
- Holsworthy, Devon
auto scraping. bed up the cubicals with saw dust just after putting fresh feed in.
- Location
- M6 Hard shoulder
Same here
lazy farmer
Member
- Location
- som/dor border
as a grazer i find the issues over the running costs to be a red herring. Its more the costs of every kilo of feed going into them is higher as are the costs of removing the waste. and as such robot systems are more vulnerable in volatile times. It really is as simple as that.
reading in the this months exporter of herds with converted costs of under 15p
reading in the this months exporter of herds with converted costs of under 15p
ollie989898
Member
T'was ever thus, and you are completely right. Once labour is put into the equation as well suddenly the running costs are put into proportion.
Perhaps in time the technology will become cheaper, and able to handle more cows per unit, as such it might find favour with low input grazing type herds?
If you play with numbers you can often nearly justify anything. I wonder what the operational cost of a robot is in litre terms? Depends on yield I guess.
jockthethistle
Member
Cows housed all the time here .. 24/7/365. Even good grazing farms are housed all the time now as summers are awful . Has been all down hill since 2005 weather.. wise .. And if they are in all the time with bots it has to be higher yields .. I think ..guy along the road is close to 50 litres a cow on LELY bots .. Grows his own grain .. He makes the numbes work for sure .. Hope this makes sence .. jtt
pine_guy
Member
- Location
- North Cumbria
"grows his own grain" is a red herring, as unless you are very good at it, the last few years it has probably been cheaper to buy it than grow it!
ollie989898
Member
Not at all, it is possible to grow a cheaper cereal crop than an arable farmer can. I would say it is comparable to growing maize but without the headaches.
My reasoning is thus:
1. Blackgrass.
2. Fertility.
wasted years
Member
- Location
- Cumbrian born and bread
Yes but the weather north of Shap is different to what you are used to, wetter weather means more green in the bottom of the crop and , as in the last 2 years spraying the crop off pre harvest often results in a 3 week wait for bad weather by which time the heads are falling off.
pine_guy
Member
- Location
- North Cumbria
I grow 60-100 acre of arable on a mixed farm as I'm not sure what I'd do with all the grass. I have bought in silage around or below cost of production. Unless I was hitting top end yields, doesn't do much than wipe it's ass. The very reason I'd consider going into milk.
*edit:- sorry forgot to say, I don't have blackgrass and I do fire plenty of slurry/FYM at my land. I do however grow a very good crop of AMG in my spring barley.
Last edited:
ollie989898
Member
You are similar to many of the people I help with but the majority of them are dairy.
We aren't looking for top end yields (much of the land in question is too wet or miserable to reliably give 4 tonne anyway), and we spend accordingly. The straw alone is a huge bonus, plus we use it as a reseeding tool. Since we have slurry and fertility, there is no P and K spend really, very little lime is required around here, and most of all, we reduce the N input. So our actual costs are comparable to an actual barley baron.
As you say, they have the land, and don't need it entirely in grass. So we use the wheat as a reseeding tool. I can kill nearly anything in wheat, even AMG very readily, much easier than I can in grassland. The land only grows wheat for a year and is put back to grass. We then move it around, establishing new leys behind it.
You also have the choice of wholecrop, crimping, alkalage or dry combining, very few of them have any real grain storage so usually it ends up in a silage clamp or heap somehow. The straw, if baled, is a huge bonus.
One thing a couple of people have done is when they have 'surplus' land, they allow an actual arable farmer to grow cereals on it, for a year (or possibly two). The deal being that we get the straw and can put dung on it, and the 'rental' value of the land is adjusted accordingly. Arable farmer gets a chunk of first wheat and can spread his fixed costs as he already has the kit. Livestock farmer has the land cleaned up, a source of straw and can reseed without ploughing behind it.
Somerset is wet as sin, I think the real difference might stem from differences in temperature and local climate etc? I do not tend to encourage people to grow spring or winter barley here, it does not like the wet and the sheer amount of fertility can make it tricky to handle. I am also near wholly dependent on contractor spraying, too.