An assessment of herd management aspects of robotic milking on UK dairy farms

This paper describes a simulation model constructed to test different management strategies for using robotic milking on dairy farms. The general model is applicable to housed or grazing cattle, including Labour requirements. The model has been applied to a representative sample from a survey of 80 farms in the UK. The costs and benefits of a robotic milking system were examined for three management regimes: all year round voluntary presentation; all year manually fetched (from fields and barn); and voluntary presentation from barns in winter, manually fetched from fields in summer. An analysis of the efficiency of the robot, i.e. the time for the robot to attach teat cups, the time for a cow to walk through the system, and the time that the robot is available to the cow, was conducted. The utilisation is shown to be as important as robot efficiency, and the cows will need to be motivated to use the robot for up to 22 h/d. Using current prices and costs, a single stall robot was compared to a multi-stall robot. The sensitivity of relative profit to robot cost and Lifetime was shown. For each pound 1000 that cost of the 1 robot and 2 milking stalls is reduced the annual relative profit of the baseline farm we analysed will increase by pound 147. The robot showed most benefit when matched to a number of cows that would utilise it at full capacity carving all the year round.