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Last year at the National Farm Machinery Show, marketing campaigns coupled every facet of agriculture with “precision” – precision planting, precision tillage, precision application and precision anything-else-you-care-to-name. The agricultural industry was gripped and entranced with technology.
Efficiency has become one of the most important factors in running any successful operation. When applied to agricultural applications like dairy farms, it comes down to balancing machine production and versatility. Regardless of size, every dairy business could benefit from evaluating areas where efficiency can be improved.
I just saw an episode of the popular Today Show on NBC that introduced viewers to some eight new cool devices to “upgrade your kitchen” and conceivably (somehow) “improve your life and make you more productive.”
The largest factor affecting forage drying is sunlight. Thus, a previous article I wrote showed that putting forage into a wide swath following mowing had the largest effect on drying rate.
Tedding and inverters can fluff the swath to enhance drying. Rakes and mergers will narrow the swath into a windrow for the baler or choppers and also expose some wetter material to sunlight to enhance drying.
I was in Portland, Oregon, sometime in the 1980s at Jubitz Truck Stop. I had spent the night in the sleeper of my hay truck, and when I pushed the start button, I got less than a weak grunt from the system. I had recently refurbished the battery cables, and the truck had been starting with vigor. Four hundred miles from home was not a nice place to be with a vehicle that would not start.
While adoption of robotic milking systems on U.S. dairy farms has been slower than in parts of Europe and Canada, these systems are slowly but steadily gaining popularity across the U.S. Greater labor flexibility and decreased labor are often given by dairy farmers as reasons for adopting this technology.
Milking routines include milking procedures such as pre-dipping, forestripping and drying of the teats along with timing of milking unit attachment. The timing between these events is important if dairy operators want to maintain or improve milk quality and maximize cow throughput in their milking centers.
Mailbox milk prices do change; this is the reality of the matter and one that dairymen have to deal with. When the price within a year drops more than 30 percent, as it did in the last 12 months, it raises yellow flags. And for many, this means looking for ways to cut ration costs. Milk price changes should not be a surprise. In the recent past, we have experienced similar, if not wider, swings.
We feed lactating dairy cows starch sources that may be ground, flaked, processed, rolled or ensiled. In addition, we store feeds containing starch in bags, bunkers and bins at different moisture contents for different lengths of time.
