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Making updates to your farm or expanding your operation with new construction may be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but the decisions you and your team make during the planning and design process will be felt for the life of the building. While realizing new facilities or a completely new dairy can be a complex and expensive undertaking, you can keep your project on track, within your budget and still reach the operational goals for your new building with the following strategies.
Scalability gives a certain level of flexibility to the way a farm can grow with robots, giving the producer a clear picture of what to expect throughout the path they choose, as well as how they can cash-flow the changes. We’ll demonstrate this using the context of a large herd robotic milking facility design planned for multiple phases of future expansion.
Automatic milking robots can essentially be arranged in one of two ways when it comes to entry and exit of cows. One way we call perpendicular and the other is tollgate.
It is imperative for the success of a robotic milking operation that its cows consistently have healthy legs and hooves with minimal lameness. After all, they need to stand and move about the barn for things to work, regardless of the cow flow system in use.
The right combination of management techniques, a good support system and optimal barn design makes it both possible and effective to incorporate robots into a grazing dairy operation.
For three years running, I’ve had the honor of sharing with the readers of Progressive Dairy, both in Canada and the U.S., what I believe are cutting-edge robot dairy facilities. These designs are the culmination of decades of combined experience from dairy producers, veterinarians, nutritionists, builders, equipment manufacturers and architects/engineers like myself.
As an architect, I’m often asked to envision the “barn of the future.” I reply that the future is here, considering the availability of robotic milking stalls, herd management software, cow and milk monitoring systems, along with a myriad of other solutions.
The following is intended to assist you with the planning and design of a robotic milking facility by providing you with features we have found to work well.
The following is intended to assist you with the planning and design of a robotic milking facility by providing you with features we have found to work well.
