Two years of experience with an automatic milking system: 1. Time on machine and successful attachments

Abstract

The installation of an automatic milking system (AMS) is not simply the replacement of an old traditional milking parlour with a new milking machine, but it requires a deeply modification of herd management (Spahr et al., 1997). Robotic milking is now considered fairly reliable and friendly and more than 1100 commercial farmers have installed at least one milking unit (De Koning et al., 2002). A lot of studies have been carried out on the interactions between milking robot, cows and farmer, but most of them referred to farm in the Northern Europe. On December 2000, an AMS (Voluntary Milking System, VMSTM, De Laval) was installed at the Experimental Farm of Istituto Sperimentale per la Zootecnia in Cremona (Italy)......

Keywords

• robotic milking, time on machine, attachments