FACILITIES & EQUIPMENT

Some things never change. The land, the clock, calendar and weather forecasts have always been the major influences in everyday farming.

One thing that has changed dramatically on the farm is the tractor. Today’s tractors and the engines that power them have evolved dramatically from the late 1800s, when mechanized traction equipment (powered by steam then gasoline) first arrived on the farm.

Never in his wildest dreams did Jake Peissig think he’d see a 13.6-kilogram-per-cow increase when he and his father built a new robotic milking facility.

Now, according to DeLaval, JTP Farms in Dorchester, Wisconsin, achieved the highest production for any VMS (voluntary milking system) customer in the world – and possibly any producer milking robotically.

Brad Romyn has a lot of reasons to smile these days. The third-generation dairy farmer from Notch Hill, British Columbia, has made significant changes to his operation which have resulted in a lot more time to spend with his family and huge improvements to his herd’s milk production.

The Romyns’ old barn was a 100-by-60-foot freestall barn with 7-foot stalls.

Typical alkaline detergents are effective in water temperatures from 76°C down to 49°C and, in most CIP situations, that’s an acceptable range.

However, when called to diagnose CIP system issues, we more often than not find that water temperatures are inadequate at the end of the cleaning cycle to fully clean the system.

In late June, the Precision Dairy Conference brought together dairy producers that utilize each of the five robotic milking systems that are now commercially available in North America. Read about how they’ve changed their farms and management systems to adopt this emerging technology.

Often we hear from a dairy farmer that he has switched liners out due to some issue he is having on his dairy.

In many cases, this is the wrong decision, and liner changing is just being used as a Band-Aid solution to some hidden problem.