Dairy farmer Tom Pfaff had researched milking parlors before his nephew persuaded him to check out a robotic dairy operation in eastern Minnesota.
Pfaff was skeptical.
"We'd been looking at putting a free-stall and parlor up for some years," he said.
His plans changed, though, the moment he stepped inside the barn at the Minnesota farm.
"The cows were so quiet and the barn was so peaceful," Pfaff recalled. "When they told me the cows had only been in there 12 days, I was sold."
Pfaff's Prairie Dairy, which includes a 420-cow free-stall barn and seven Lely robotic milking units, was completed last November.
It sits a half-mile down the road from the Melrose farm his father, Tom Pfaff, purchased in 1962.
The new operation, installed by Preston Dairy Equipment of Sparta, is an upgrade from the home farm, where, at one point, the Pfaffs switched out cows to milk 160 in the 65-cow stanchion barn built in 1970. For a while they also milked in a 40-cow barn across the road.
"This took a lot of the physical work away," he said. "We have more animals, so we're still out here as many hours, but it's not that back-breaking work."
Ron Rodenberg, Pfaff's herdsman who started in November, said he has been most impressed with cow comfort in the new barn.
"You're really never pushing the cows," Rodenberg said, adding that most of the herd comes willingly to the chute.
"We always have a few we have to fetch," he said, "but we have a drop gate we can use on the few that don't want to come in."
Pfaff said that even cows previously milked in a parlor adjusted well.
He agreed that the cows are more relaxed in their new building.
Click here to read the full article.
Photo courtesy of Danielle Begalke. Vernon County 4-H youth watched as a robotic arm swung down to clean and milk a Holstein cow in the robotic milking system chute Aug. 11 at Pfaff’s Prairie Dairy in Melrose.
No comments:
Post a Comment