Influence of provision of concentrate at milking on voluntary cow traffic in a pasture-based automatic milking system

Abstract

The success of an automatic milking system is generally reliant upon the voluntary movement of cows around the farm system and the correct management of incentives to achieve a targeted level of cow traffic. The present study investigated the effect of providing a small feed reward as an incentive at milking on the premilking voluntary waiting time of cows milked on a prototype robotic rotary in an Australian pasture-based dairy. The 2 treatments were "feed on" (concentrate offered at milking) and "feed off" (no concentrate offered at milking), with data from a single herd of 168 lactating dairy cows collected over 16d. A survival analysis with time-varying covariates was used to model the voluntary waiting times of cows in the premilking yard. The median time cows spent waiting before milking was 129 min and after 4h just over 70% of the cows had exited the yard (volunteered for milking). When feed was provided, cows were faster to exit the premilking yard (shorter time spent waiting) and waited just over half the time (0.53×) they did during the "feed off" treatment. Heifers exited the premilking yard more rapidly than cows in later lactations, with older cows spending at least 1.40 times longer in the yard before milking. Average daily milk yield along with stage of lactation and fetching cows from the paddock also influenced cow traffic in the premilking yard. As the number of cows in the premilking yard increased, voluntary waiting time also increased. At a queue length of 20 or more cows, the negative effect on waiting time of an additional cow entering the yard was less than that when fewer than 20 cows were present. Results demonstrated that feeding a small reward on the robotic rotary platform can reduce the time cows spend in the premilking yard, leading to a potential reduction in the risk of congestion at the dairy, particularly during times of high demand. Minimizing congestion will likely benefit multiple aspects of the voluntary milking operation, including a potential improvement in robot utilization, a reduction in unnecessary time spent off pasture by cows in the milking herd, promoting cow welfare through reducing the risk of lameness, and enhancing productivity. Targeting strategies to minimize queue length to less than the threshold length, which in this study was 20 cows, could result in reduced time spent in the premilking yard.

Offering a forage crop at pasture did not adversely affect voluntary cow traffic or milking visits in a pasture-based automatic milking system

“…CowID (individual cow given a unique identification number) and TrialDay (data collection day) were included as random effects, as was the residual error term, ε. In pasture-based AMS, cows are able to act independently of their herdmates and, as such, are considered as the experimental unit Wredle, 2004 andLyons et al, 2013b and2013c;Scott et al, 2014).…”

“…General farm management All cows were milked on a 16-bail internal herringbone prototype RR (Kolbach et al, 2012) and managed as a single herd under voluntary cow traffic conditions, with eight of the 16 bails available for milking at any one time in an attempt to manage system utilisation (match throughput capacity to herd size, as previously reported by Scott et al, 2014). To access the RR, cows were directed at Gate 1 into the closed premilking yard (i.e.…”

“…Therefore, the potential exists for cow traffic at the dairy to be reduced as demand for the RR increases. It has been reported that premilking queue lengths exceeding 20 cows increased the time cows spent waiting before milking (Scott et al, 2014); however, knowledge surrounding strategies to minimise queue length and congestion, and maintain efficient cow traffic at the dairy, is somewhat limiting at present.…”

“…Offering feed during milking or in the dairy facility has been linked to increases in voluntary cow traffic in pasture-based systems (Lyons et al, 2013b;Scott et al, 2014), although varying the quantity of feed offered during milking was reported to have no effect on improving cow traffic in indoor systems (Halachmi et al, 2005;Bach et al, 2007). Pasture allocations, or more specifically the amount of pasture biomass offered per cow, has been shown to impact cow behaviour and the timing at which cows exit an allocation (Lyons et al, 2014).…”

The effect of concentrate allocation on traffic and milk production of pasture-based cows milked by an automatic milking system

“…Gregarious behaviour and distance to the robot make the cows less motivated to go for milking, causing irregularity in milking intervals over the lactation with a negative effect on milk production (Ayadi et al, 2004;Delamaire and Guinard-Flament, 2006). Therefore, cow traffic is a fundamental aspect to be considered in the attempt to combine AMS and grazing (Lyons et al, 2013b;Scott et al, 2014). Varying factors which may improve cow traffic to the AMS have been described in the literature.…”