I hope you're able to help, we're looking at getting robot milkers and are confused by the choice out there - some are a lot more expensive than others, is this because they're better quality or just clever marketing? What have people found in practice with these milkers? It'd be good to know if they're all much of a much-ness or whether some are better than others on quality /longevity/ call outs /service and so on. Thanks for your help, it's really hard to know what to do for the best.
Which robot is best?
- Thread starter puffy
- Start date
Lely, De leval, GEA monobox, but also keen to hear suggestions of any others that people reckon are good.
- Location
- M6 Hard shoulder
All robots will milk cows, depends what you are wanting to achieve, personally if I had my time again I would still have lely robots but I would just have a bog basic milking machine on the cheapest service contract, we have excellent backup and service from our lely centre at Stafford.
wasted years
Member
- Location
- Cumbrian born and bread
Robots are an extremely personal thing,it will be very rare for a farmer to have experience of more than one make IMO.
Back up is everything until you get to the stage where you understand them yourself, but even then back up is still everything.
Robot Jon
Member
- Location
- North Devon
Currently putting in a greenfield site with a robot so to early for me to say to much yet but we decided to go lely, what in are opinion was a fairly easy decision. To be honest we only looked at lely and delaval but felt the backup with the lely was miles ahead of the delaval. visited delaval farms that had a massive stock of spare parts because they couldn't rely on the dealer to sort the problem out quick enough didn't fill us with much confidence. Also when feed reps and vets etc ask what make you are putting in they all breath a sigh of relief when i say we are putting in a lely what says a lot. Price wise the lely is more expensive but for us with the cost of the new shed etc the extra cost of the lely over the delaval is fairly small.
I work at a farm with two DeLaval VMS. I have no experience with Lely but from what I've seen I really like that you can put on the cups manually one by one with the VMS. And you have the Online Cell Counter. Fast and good service on the phone/or visits when needed. But we have a large stock for parts, as we want to sort it out and change some parts by ourselves rather than having to call the technician. And I like the smart gates.
Lely seems to have a more cow-comfortable robot from my perspective. Less movement in the robotic arm when milking (saves time). Robot looks clean and calm. I would miss the OCC though.
Ask me what you want to know and I'll try to answer.
Thanks, that's really helpful. How reliable is the attachment process? You say you have a stock of parts but how often would you say with the 2 robots you have to repair /sort an error out? Also, how often do you have to call an engineer to sort a breakdown out? Finally and sorry for all the questions, but how old are the De levals you're working with?
Thanks, it's good to hear your thoughts on it. It's interesting that most people we know seem to put Lely in. Good luck with your build.
I think we are really good at sorting out most of the things for ourselves, so we don't call for help that often. And when we replace one functioning (or partly) part with a new one we keep the old one for emergencies so we never have a robot standing still when waiting for the technician to arrive with the new part. Like valves, milk pumps, sensors, ropes and so on. Most of the time we can get help on the phone, and the technicians can log in to our computors from wherever they are and see what the problem is. I think that we have a maximum of two errrors/month. We have a really great technician who lives not far from us, so he's a rock when we have some small issues or questions. Our robots are from 2008.
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No problem!
- Location
- Northumberland
if you have a few hours to spare work your way through this thread. Covers every thing you need yo know about robots
https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/robotic-milking.143/
https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/robotic-milking.143/
Thanks that's great
happycows
Member
- Location
- North Devon Cornwall border
More like days......
we currently have GEA miones and i would have to say they have been extremely unreliable, expensive to run and had a huge negative impact on the welfare of our herd and our lively hoods. It is rare not to have a txt msg most nights and i would say it is not unusual to attend to it through the night at least half of the week. Alot of issues we put to teething problems at the start and when we questioned, we had back we were the only ones, almost four years down the line we have recently discovered in the last year we are not the only ones with an endless list of problems. it appeared to be a common theme amongst other Mione farmers that they were the only ones and also of the miselling of the product. .The monobox could be a totally different machine altogether but id like to see it on the ground first for at least two years to have an idea of running costs and reliability. Our vet definitely isn't endorsing any of them!
- Location
- South Molton
Lely make mowers balers tedders rakes....not just robots
- Location
- South Molton
We keep a stock of spares as we can fit alot ourselves rather than call out an engineer.
We have had 1 out of hours call since installing s/h in Jan
- Tags
- maize