Dairy Unit 

Future Farm Main Dairy Unit operates commercially to provide a platform for teaching and research.

The main dairy unit provides accommodation for 400 cows. Cows are milked in a 40-point GEA internal rotary parlour with computerised cow identification that records data such as milk yields and monitors cow activity for oestrus detection. One rotation of the 40-point parlour takes eight to twelve minutes and the target annual yield for the unit is 10,000l/cow, milked three times a day.

The operators work from the inside of the circular pit enabling them to see all the cows easily and it is an ideal layout for teaching purposes. The farm supports student activities on a daily basis from Rural Skills Sessions and HRP students to PhD projects. The unit also features a parlour viewing gallery and modern cow housing.

Cow housing incorporates two spacious, light and airy cow housing buildings, aiming to offer the optimum conditions for dairy cow health, especially to maximise ventilation. One building contains an area entirely of cubicle housing and the other provides both cubicles and straw yards. Automatic ventilation screens on some exterior walls react to wind speed helping protect sensitive computerised feeders. Other features of the cow housing:

• roving feed drones push up feed throughout the day increasing appetites
• spacious cubicles accommodate the modern large dairy cow with Easy-Fix mattresses
• cubicles are bedded up three times a week with quality sawdust and hydrated lime
• slurry is scraped using the recently installed automatic scrapers which scrape along the passways every two hours leading to an underground slurry pit,
• passageways can be washed using water from tipping water troughs which then refill to provide fresh water for the cows.

Cow Manager, a management system, is used for heat detection, rumination and eating times as well as providing an early warning system for sub-clinical disease detection. Alongside this will be Bovisync for every day, cloud-based data recording. This will allow fellow colleagues and students across the entire campus access to live data for all dairy cows.