Upgrading their farm’s milking facilities has enabled the Blowey family from Lamerton near Tavistock to improve the way they manage their dairy herd and reduce milking times by more than 50 percent.

Phil Blowey farms with his parents, Peter and Judith, at Higher Woodley Farm near Tavistock where they milk 100 cows on 148 acres.

The autumn calving herd has historically been milked through a 10:10 jar-type herringbone parlour that was originally installed in 1974. Despite being upgraded to include ACRs and automatic milk transfer, the old parlour was becoming increasingly unreliable with milking times regularly extending to six hours or more per day.

Faced with the option of replacing the parlour or quitting milk production, the Bloweys have recently installed a 20:20 Fullwood herringbone parlour that has not only reduced milking times, but also led to improvements in cow welfare and the family’s working conditions.

“The old parlour was basically falling to pieces,” Phil Blowey describes. “It was over 40 years old and had got to the stage where there weren’t many milkings when something didn’t go wrong.

“Every morning we’d have our fingers crossed that the milk and vacuum pumps would start up, and even without any problems, the morning milking would take at least three hours to complete, with the afternoon milking taking almost as long.”

The parlour had also become too small for the herd, with modern genetics meaning the cows had outgrown the antiquated set-up, making for cramped and uncomfortable milking conditions.

“In hindsight, the recent round of milk price cuts meant it was the wrong time to invest,” Phil adds, “but we had no choice – it was literally a case of putting in a new parlour or getting out of milk production.”

Having committed to invest in a new parlour, the Bloweys looked at how best to update their farm’s infrastructure. “We looked at robots, but decided we’d prefer to milk the cows ourselves,” Phil explains. “We were also sceptical about how well robots would fit with our grazing system as there’s a road separating the farm buildings and grazing land which meant the cows wouldn’t have free access to come and go as they please.”

With robots dismissed from the list of viable options, Phil settled on a new herringbone, but had to decide which layout would be best: a swing-over or doubled-up assembly.

“We wanted to fit the new parlour into an existing building which was converted by our neighbour, Daniel Edwards, so only had a limited amount of space to work with,” Phil describes. “The extra length needed for a 14:28 swingover parlour would have significantly reduced the area available for the collecting yard. Instead, we opted for a 20:20 system which takes up less length and gives us enough space for a decent size collecting yard.”

The 50-degree herringbone sits within a 30ft by 90ft footprint and boasts improved cow flow compared to the outgoing unit. “Cows had to enter the old parlour through doors which were slightly offset from the milking platforms,” Phil explains. “That wasn’t conducive to efficient cow flow, especially when trying to persuade timid or young heifers to load up onto a platform that they couldn’t see properly.”

With the new parlour installed and commissioned by Fullwood South West in October 2015, each milking now takes just an hour and a quarter including washing down. But the new facilities offer much more than reduced milking times.

“The cows are happier going in and out of the new parlour and they fit onto the milking platform much more comfortably,” Phil describes. “It’s also a brighter, more relaxed and nicer place to work from my point of view. I’m have more time during the day to concentrate on other jobs and can finish milking earlier in the evenings.”

The introduction of several new technologies, which weren’t previously used at Higher Woodley, have further improved the way the herd is managed.

“The new parlour is connected to Fullwood’s herd management software, Crystal, which enables us to feed to yield in the parlour,” Phil adds. “We’re using three basic feed curves for freshly calved heifers, fresh cows and established milkers, and have worked closely with John Cann from Crediton Milling to fine tune the herd’s nutrition. With his help we’ve been able to use a targeted feeding approach to increase each cow’s production peak and to maintaining those peaks for longer. That’s allowed us to achieve our primary goal of increasing yields, as well as hitting our secondary target of feeding to produce milk more efficiently.”

Individual cow identification and activity monitoring is taken care of by Fullwood pedometers, with Crystal providing easy to interpret fertility data for each cow. “We’re catching far more silent heats and have actually seen every heat since the system was introduced,” Phil says. “For a closed herd like ours, that’s a fantastic result as it will enable us to keep the calving pattern as tight as possible.”

The Crystal software also interprets data from the parlour’s in-line conductivity meters. “We’re catching the first signs of mastitis much earlier and are able to treat cows before the condition gets too serious,” Phil comments. Fullwood’s cluster flushers have also been fitted allowing the clusters to be sanitised after each cow has been milked, thereby eliminating the spread of mastitis from one cow to the next.

When he was finalising the parlour’s specification, Phil knew he wanted the parlour to be as open, airy and easy to keep clean as possible. “I didn’t want a raft of overhead pipework and didn’t want the parlour to look dirty after the first few weeks of use,” he explains. “This will be the last parlour I ever buy so I wanted to get it 100% right.”

The parlour walls have therefore been lined with easy-to-clean fibreglass, and the parlour has been fitted with Fullwood’s Cleanline stainless steel cabinets which enclose the parlour’s pipe work, valves and electronics, protecting them from damage, dirt and water ingress.

“We get very little dust building up in the parlour, partly because we’ve installed the feeders behind the parlour’s walls,” Phil says. “That, and the fact we’ve removed as much overhead clutter as possible and put pipework in cabinets makes the parlour easy to keep clean.

“We’ve always prided ourselves on our attention to detail, but the new parlour and the way it has been designed for our specific needs has enabled us to improve the way we manage our cows. We’re now better placed to produce higher quality milk and for the herd to reach its optimum performance.”