Barns & Equipment

Ask any dairy producer what their number one expense is, and they’re likely to say, “feed.” The average 800-cow dairy farm spends more than $150,000 on feed each month and over $1.8 million every year.

Looking to get more data from the milking parlor, the owners of Rosy-Lane Holsteins LLC purchased a monitoring system from Afimilk with plans to monitor daily milk weights to watch fresh cows and identify sick cows faster.

One of the biggest challenges hay producers have always faced is hitting that perfect moisture window. Forage analysis supports what many producers have known for a long time – minimizing the time hay lies in the field improves relative feed value (RFV).

Fear and trepidation is normal when searching for used equipment. If only we had supernatural powers to see and know where trouble may lie.… Since we do not have such powers, a systematic examination of the used piece of equipment can help you locate problems which might otherwise be overlooked.

While rotary parlors have become a predominant choice for milking large herds, rotaries are not a new idea. They date back to the unveiling of the Rotolactor at the 1930 World’s Fair. Many variations of rotary milking environments have been brought to market since then.

Robotic milking was first adopted in the U.S. on a dairy farm in Wisconsin in 2000. Nearly 20 years later, the vast concentration of automated milking systems in this country remains north of the 40th parallel – the latitude line that runs across the U.S. and is marked by Kansas’ northern border – while very few systems can be found in the southern U.S.