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:
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.
Trial area A is available for up to sixty cows, from the main herd, to feed individually. These cows wear a neck transponder, allowing access to an individual feed unit. The amount of feed eaten can be automatically weighed and recorded thereby allowing a comparison of different diets in the same area with minimum disturbance to the cows.
The dairy unit has been designed with emphasis on environmental sustainability:
The Environmental Sustainability groups were formed in 2021 and the dairy unit is a proud contributor to the development and research behind these groups.
The unit facilitates research projects as part of the Future Farm mission to achieve net-zero by 2030.
At Harper Adams we also have a precision dairy unit in partnership with Agri-Epi and is the Midlands Dairy Research Centre.
Further information on this unique collaboration can be found on the Agri-EPI Centre website.
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