Dairy Unit

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

The main dairy unit provides accommodation for over 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 13,700l/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. Whilst fans have been installed in the cow housing buildings to reduce the impact of heat stress in the summer. Other features of the cow housing includes:

• 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 day with quality sawdust and hydrated lime
• Slurry is scraped using automatic scrapers which scrap 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.
• Rubberised matting has been installed in feed passage ways and the collecting yard to provide cow comfort and improve foot health.
• In the new cattle handling facility, HerdVision cameras have been installed to measure the milking cows body condition score (BCS) and locomotion score 3 times a day, as well as the installation of the Datamars WOW (walk over weigher) system which allows the ruminant staff to monitor the weight of the milking cows. In addition to these new technologies, three new DeLaval segregation gates have been installed at the facility, which are operated by the EID tags in the dairy cows ear.

All cows wear ID pedometers for the parlour and have 'Cow Manager' ear tags, which is a management tool used for detecting when the animal is in heat, rumination and eating times as well as providing an early warning system for sub-clinical disease detection. This will allow fellow colleagues and students across the entire campus access to live data for all dairy cows.