When it comes to producing high-quality milk, clean milking equipment is a crucial part to achieving this goal. Monitoring milk quality counts, and keeping your milking equipment cleaning on track is a must to consistently produce high-quality milk.

What goes up must come down! With some horsepower, careful planning and a really long chain, Collins Dairy LLC of Greenleaf, Wisconsin, took down the Harvestore silo they were no longer using to store high-moisture corn on their farm. They now place all high-moisture corn on a concrete drive-over pile. Watch what happened here.

Winter is an ideal time to follow these maintenance tips to keep your equipment running like new, season after season.

Footbaths are commonly used on dairies to reduce the incidence of infectious claw disorders such as digital dermatitis (hairy heel wart) and foot rot. A common practice on many dairies involves adding chemicals to the footbath and mixing these chemicals within the bath. This can result in poor mixing of the chemicals and is also labor-intensive.

As a boy growing up on the farm, I witnessed my dad build many of our buildings, barns and sheds as he transformed the farm he had purchased into a modern working dairy. We had several smaller (8- to 20-ton) feed bins that were erected on the farm, and I recall the “fun” of piecing them together a bolt at a time along with the roll of sealer/caulk to make the bin watertight as we went.

While the refractometer only started gaining popularity in the dairy industry in recent years, the technology itself dates back to 1869. It has been used since in chemistry and food sciences to analyze solutions and purity of substances. On today’s dairies, we use refractometers in three main ways:

Q: My water pump is slowing down, so I thought I would replace the impeller. How do I get it off? A:  (By regular contributor Brad Nelson) Most, if not all automotive water pumps have the impeller pressed onto the shaft. In easy layman’s terms, that means the shaft is just a smidgen larger than the bore of the impeller.

Properly designed and managed freestalls can provide dairy cows with a comfortable resting environment. Maximizing cow comfort will increase lying times, which can provide many benefits to dairy producers, including higher milk yields and cow longevity. However, poorly designed and kept freestalls can result in greater incidences of mastitis, lameness and hock injuries.

Which mechanic are you? • You watch the calendar almost as religiously as the Super Bowl countdown – just XXX days before you haul that equipment to the field again, and by darn, you’re not about to get it ready until you absolutely have to.