50. 16 Hour Milking

This is my 50^th blog post on ‘The Udder Side Of The World’, and this milestone comes at a time in which a major change has happened on the farm. Due to a need to save grass for the winter, the powers that be have decided that 16 hour milking is the way forward for the rest of the season. 

Although called 16 hour, it is actually 17½ hr / 17½ hr / 13 hr milking. We milk at 5 am, 6 pm then 11:30 am the following day. The main thing is that we milk three times every two days, rather than the usual four milkings. These timings are the most practical, although now two of the three milkings are during major meal times, which as you can imagine does not sit well with me.

Having done over a week of this new system, I have doubled the number of meals I eat during the day, although the meal size is halved. It is like I am on a pasture based system of eating when I am hungry rather than coming into the feed-lot three times a day.

When you need to reduce grass intake from your cows, there are a number of things you could do;

1. Dry off cows – the cows still need to eat, much less, but they are not producing anything.

2. Cull cows – Definitely not producing any milk from dead cows, although dead cows also don’t eat any valuable grass.

3. Fill the cows full of silage – Before we switched to 16hr, the herd was already getting six bales of silage per day on top of grass. That is about 1800 KgDM/ha of silage. If we fed them even more silage the feed cost would get pretty high, and we still have the rest of autumn and winter to go.

4. Sixteen hour milking – The aim is that milk yield drops a little bit, but grass intake drops more. So effectively it is going towards an even lower low-input, low-output system.

I was pretty excited about this major change. I am here in NZ to learn more about dairy farming so this opportunity to work a system that is very different from what I have learnt in the UK is very interesting. I will explain what I have observed so far.

Cows are animals that live for routine, any change in their daily schedule messes them up a bit and ultimately shows in their production. Even if I milk in a different coloured hat, I reckon they get a bit stroppy. So as you can imagine this huge change gets them all worked up a bit.

In the evening milking at 6 pm they would come flying in to be milked and peg it out of the shed and race back to the paddock. It just gets dark in the first half hour of this session so feels very strange finishing in the dead of night. Sometimes when I go to fetch the cows to be milked they are confused and think that they are getting more grass so go the wrong way away from the gate. Here patience is the most important of virtues! They have settled down now and I think are getting used to the new system.

The milk yield immediately dropped when we lost that one milking every second day. I think we dropped in two days from over 14,000 litres to about 11,500. Very alarming as this was, it was kind of expected and the docket from the subsequent milk collection revealed milk had gone up by 800 litres. It stayed reasonably constant for the pick-up after that. It will be very interesting to see how much they get back up to producing, although they are naturally giving less milk as they near the end of the lactation.

A side effect of this system is high risk of a rise in mastitis incidence in the first week or two of reduced milkings. (It may make my readers who have ever written a scientific dissertation smile to know that I nearly went to look for a reference from a peer-reviewed study for that statement!) So, according to Common Sense and M Y Boss, 2013, it is important to watch out for a sudden increase of mammary infection. We have only treated one cow for mastitis since the switch, which is good. Although there are a few cows that now have a big blue ‘C’ on their udder reminding us to check every milking. They are ones where clinical mastitis might be on its way or just look a bit swollen. The somatic cell count rose to the 250’s, from about 180 (000 cells per ml), but is not anywhere near worrying levels, and already on the way down.

I am really enjoying this new system, if for no other reason that it gives me a lie-in until 7 o’ clock every second day. The worst part is when motivation to milk dips to a low at 6 pm with 496 cows to milk. I will continue to report in an entirely un-scientific way, on my findings of 16 hour milking and the pros and cons of such a system.

In other news, a massive effluent pond is being constructed on the farm. It will contain what I believe is called a ‘weeping wall’, to separate the solid from the liquid and will ultimately reduce urea use as fertiliser by replacing it with the dirty water from the shed and yards. At the moment our effluent is pumped to the neighbouring farm and spread on their paddocks, not ours.

Autumn continues to roll along, at the moment it is a bit cold and rainy. Last week though, we had a proper cold snap which caused the first whitening of the tops of the higher mountains as this picture shows;

The sudden drop in temperature also prompted me to replace these poorly wind-proofed gloves,

With these beasts,

They make 4 am quad bike rides much more pleasant, although it becomes very tricky picking anything small up. On the packaging it said that the material along the top of the thumb was perfectly designed for ‘flicking away sweat’. I know for a fact that that is false, it is there purely for wiping a runny nose.

Finally I should offer my congratulations to my employers David and Jocelyn who have just had a baby. As half Irish, half Kiwi I am positive that he will grow up to have language so profane that the air around him will be permanently blue! This will be no reflection on his parents as individuals, just my observations of the two nationalities’ take on the English language, where every other word needs to be bleeped if said before 9pm! Try being in an Otago pub when the Highlanders are losing (again). The referee, unfortunately dressed head to toe in bright pink, gets some amount of abuse. My vocabulary has been expanded considerably!

See you next time.