DeLaval has announced the largest robot batch milking farm is working well at Lønholm Agro near Kolding, Denmark. The 830 strong pedigree Jersey herd is being milked by 24 VMS™ V310 robots in a unique batch milking system which will enable owner Klaus Jakobsen to grow the herd to 1400 cows in the near future.
“We started milking in May this year and the cows adapted very quickly. Batch milking is the right system for our 700 hectare farm because we needed to reduce our dependence on skilled labour and have a milking method that could be scaled up easily and quickly,” he says.
DeLaval launched the concept of batch milking in 2021 and there are now 150 VMS robots installed globally, with herd sizes ranging in size from 250 to 2000 cows. Batch milking requires only one unskilled staff member to milk a herd of up to 2000 which makes it attractive to markets where recruitment is difficult and skilled wages are high.
Commenting on the success of batch milking, DeLaval’s Jonas Hällman, Executive Vice President, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) says:
“The VMS batch setup is flexible and can easily be scaled up for a wide variety of farms, including very large ones. In addition, automatic milking requires little manual work, which can reduce labour dependencies and related costs.”
Batch milking has provided Mr Jacobsen with a system that can be managed from anywhere in the world. Using just a mobile device he can monitor the productivity and health of every cow using data sent by the robots.
“I can see milk yield, when and why it has fluctuated, monitor pregnancy using the robot’s progesterone testing module, and also use cameras to observe the cows being at rest and during milking,” he says.
DeLaval suggests that whilst herd sizes are growing worldwide as farms consolidate, batch milking offers a solution to managing growing herds with less dependence on labour and the benefit of more data to improve productivity.