Another Visit to a Milking Station.

Hello Everybody and Happy New Year,

I'm going to start this year by a posting about a visit to a very well run Milking Station. This particular farm is a regular Milk Producer and the Farmer has 15 years of experience with Milk matters. His facility is accredited and regularly audited to ensure that the basic hygiene standards and animal health standards are always met.

Animals

The breed of the Animals here are Frisian cows. Approximately 35-40 Cows are kept here and Milked Daily. The average output per animal is 15 liters per day, but it is not unusual for a suitably fed animal to produce up to 25 to 30 liters of milk per animal, something only possible with the correct feed and correct care.

The animals are kept inside at all times. The enclosure is washed and scraped several times a day. Note the wet floor. Constant attention is necessary to maintain a high level of cleanliness. In some farms, leavings are removed as soon as they are deposited, which goes to show the level of attention paid.

This particular herd is maintained to a very high standard of cleanliness, and are medicated frequently to avoid infection by disease and attacks by parasites. 

Young calves separated from their mothers and fed a milk replacement. The female calves are usually kept to adulthood whilst males are sold of after 1 year to become steers (Meat Cows). Normally the cycle from young calf to milking adult takes about 2 years.

Male calves and their female counterparts are usually kept separated. Any male that will become dominant in their later years usually will start to show this behavior at an early age. It is important not to allow such behavior to persist as this will lead to excessive aggression and handling issues by the time the animal needs to be disposed of.

This fella over here was eating and is wondering why some guy with a silly looking black object is bothering it.

Milk cows in general are not as aggressive as other cows. The worst case I have come across are reservation or Wild cows. Wild cows do not like intruders, and will circle one several times just to get a look at the intruder, before running away en-masse. Milk cows however do not behave like that at all

At the time of the visit, which is around midday, cows are normally wound down and look for rest. Their active period is at night, when they tend to eat much more than during the day. Here an empty daytime trough is usually filled to the brim at night.

This cow was previously a bit to handle as evident by the ring in its nose. Usually an aggressive animal is more intelligent than the other docile counterparts, and for that reason, they are more alert. If you could attribute aggression towards gender in humans in cows or any animal, this line is usually quite blurred.

Just because their more intelligent also means their more inquisitive. Also aggressive cows and bulls don't like being touched. If a dominant male bull becomes violent, usually people run away and not try to be 'heroic' if you know what I mean.

Feed

Feed is the most important part of a Milk cow production. The feed has to have a high protein content. In order to reduce cost a farmer would typically cultivate their own feed on a rotational basis. The feed here would be Napier Grass, which is planted grown and harvested over a period of 60 days.








Once the Napier has been cut, it is replanted using a small percentage of live stalks. These covered with Animal leavings which have been collected to be used as a fertilizer, will be left to grow.

Supplementation of the Animals diet begins by adding extra protein. In this case soybean hull pellet or basically, the skin of the soybean is used. Although this adds extra protein to the feed, it also adds a cost, so such a feed should be used sparingly.

Another component of the Animals diet is fiber. This stuff, is called Brew. It is what is leftover from beer making. Although such a feed is considered a waste, there is a cost attached to it as such a feed is much sought after by other breeders and not just for mammalian livestock either. An alternative would be Corn Trees but in this locality, close to an urbanized area, such a commodity is impossible to obtain.

Equipment

Milking Urns and milk collection buckets all washed and dried before the evening milk collection a few hours away. Note the medicine cabinet on the right as well as other supplements in the rack under the table. I will do a posting on some common medicines, sprays, minerals etc and describe their cost and quantity required.

A branch chopper is necessary for chopping up stalks of Napier to smaller pieces. This particular unit is electrically driven, which is cheaper to run than than a petrol driven version. This eliminates waste from the feed supply, as long bulky stalks are less likely to be eaten when compared to the soft leafy portions of the grass plant. 

This farm runs on an electrically driven milking station with a clear milk collection vessel to measure the quantity of milk being collected. Such a piece of equipment whilst looking to be inexpensive, requires electricity to run cheaply as using diesel or petrol generators will add more cost to the activity. 

Overview

This particular farm was very well run and managed, mainly because the farmer had experience in the production of milk and knows that farming is about trying to keep costs to a minimum whilst maximizing your returns from production. This is a basic rule of farming and of any business. The Farm's main activities were the growing and processing of feed, the collection of Milk, the Daily monitoring of sanitary conditions and last but not least,  the basic health and well being of the Animals kept on site.

To emulate this will take a lot of doing, but in my experience, a little bit of know how goes a long way. What is critical is the day to day management and the allocation of resources. If you can manage somehow running a mismanaged enterprise and bring it back from the point of failure, such a task, such as this will require limited skills when compared to the former. Real Farms with problems are much more difficult to manage as there is always the issue of cost, which erodes what you can supply to your animals economically.

If you could compare this visit to the previous Milking station, you can see the vast differences, and not because the previous farm was mismanaged either. Actually doing the work is not as simple and variability may even boil down to external factors beyond the Farmers control. I'm not making excuses, only saying that we should not as a visitor to such places come to a negative conclusion about who is or is not competent. At the end of the day if you were willing to plunge headfirst into such a venture, one cannot be a hypocrite especially when you've no idea of the difficulties because you haven't even started.

Overall this visit has given me more ideas to tap into and perhaps the more such farms I visit, the better the ideas will be. When it comes down actually executing my own project in the near future, such ideas can be of aid to cut down on costs and even small and cheap ideas can help in reducing all the red ink from the investment and shorten the time it takes to get a solid return. At the end of the day the money needs to keep turning which will slowly erode the capital cost to the point of making a clean profit, which is the whole point of the exercise.

Up Next: Sizing up the Mess Part 2